"Thus this great earth itself, has been but one continued illustration of the great theory and principle of progress. From a beginning, lost in the thick darkness of a past eternity, it has been marching forward in a career as pause-less as the sun in his journeyings through the sky, as clearly demonstrable as the growth of the germ that starts from the buried acorn, and moves on to its full development in the great oak. Science records with unerring certainty the progress of the earth, and of animal life, from the lowest existences in the mollusca and polypi, up to the superlatively complicated, and delicate structure of man, tracing it step by step, until it is finished in the noblest work of God, a human body coupled with an immortal soul!
"And here arises a question which science has not solved, and to which the philosophy, the wisdom, the logic of the past can give no answer. The earth, and the things of the earth, have been moving forward, marching on towards perfectability always. Is this forward movement finished? We have, in looking at the subject in the light of science, a time when there was not on the earth, in the air, or in the water, any living thing. We have an era when animal life was but a span removed from vegetable vitality; we have an era of gigantic vegetable growth; an era of gigantic but rude animal growth, and so on step by step down to the advent of man. The previous combinations of animal life and vegetable life passed away with the era in which they flourished; one class succeeding another, each emerging from, and stepping over the annihilation of its predecessor, till we come down to the present—is there no future progress for this earth as a planet? Is there to be no other era, where man himself, like the sauruses, like the mastodon, shall have passed away, to be succeeded by some nobler animal structure, some loftier intelligence, some more cunning invention of the infinite mind?
"Man, great in intellect, powerful in mind, gifted with reason, and having within him a spirit that is immortal, proud, glorious, aspiring as he is, falls very far short of perfection in every attribute of his nature. To say, therefore, that the prescience, the creative power of the Almighty, reached the limit of its achievements in the creation of man, is to impeach the omnipotence of God himself. Will any man insist that the ingenuity of the Almighty is exhausted? May it not be, then that the time will come when some sentient beings, as far superior to man, as man is to the animals of the era of the lizards and the amphibia, shall, like the geologists of the present day, be delving among the rocks and rubbish of vanished ages, for evidences of the existences of our own proud species at, to them, some remote period of the world's progress?
"If these questions cannot be answered by the learned and the wise, if science makes no response, and philosophy furnishes no solution of them, who dare say that the world is not, even now, entering upon a new era of progress, taking another step in the forward movement? May it not be, that the time is coming when the barrier between the living, and the disembodied spirit is to be broken down? When that viewless essence, that mystery of mysteries, the spirit of life, the immortal soul, shall be permitted to come back from the unknown country, to impart to the people of this world, the wisdom, the mysteries, and the glory of the next? May not this be the new era that is about opening in the progress of all things? It may be asked, is it not possible that a new principle is about being evolved, that will admit of communication between the living and the physically dead? May it not be that the world and its surroundings, have become so changed, that what was impossible thousands, or even hundreds, of years ago, may have become, or be about to become possible now? That the same process which carried this earth forward from the beginning, that so changed the atmosphere of old, rendered it fit to sustain animal life in its rudest structure, that so changed it again, as to make it capable of sustaining a higher order of animal organism, that kept on changing, and improving the whole face of the earth, that so arranged organic matter, as to make this world, at last, a fit residence for man, may be going on still; approaching all things nearer, and nearer to perfection, until we have arrived upon the threshold of an era, when living men may commune with the spirits of the physically dead? An era as yet but in its dawn, when the stupendous future can be seen only as through a glass darkly?
"Remember, I do not assert my faith in a theory which is indicated by an affirmative answer to these inquiries, for I have none. I give the record of the earth's progress in the past, as it is written upon the rocks, standing out upon precipices, brought to light by the researches, and translated by the energy of science from forgotten and buried ages. The deductions to be drawn from it, I leave to those who have a taste for the speculative, neither believing in, nor quarrelling with the theory which they may predicate upon it."
CHAPTER XVII.
LITTLE TOPPER'S LAKE—A SPIKE BUCK—A THUNDER STORM IN THE FOREST—THE HOWL OF THE WOLF.
We spent the next day in coasting Round Pond, looking into its secluded bays, and resting, when the sun was hot, beneath the shadows of the brave old trees that line the banks. In floating along the shore of this beautiful sheet of water, one can hardly help imagining that in the broken rocks and rough stones piled up along the margin of the lake, he sees the rains of an ancient wall, the mortar of which has become disintegrated by time, and the masonry fallen down. He will see at intervals what, from a little distance, seems like a solid wall of stone, laid with care, and upon which the lapse of centuries has wrought no change, so regular are the strata of which it is composed, while an occasional boulder, large as a house, and covered with moss, reminds him of the ruined tower of some stronghold. He will see, as he rounds some rocky point, half a dozen of these gigantic boulders piled together, leaning against each other with great cavernous openings between, through which he can walk erect, and he involuntarily looks around him for the armor of the ancient giants who piled up these stupendous rocks and walled in the lake with these massive boulders.
As we swept around a point near the south shore of the lake, we saw a deer at a quarter of a mile from us, feeding upon the lily pads that grew along the shore. Spalding and myself were in advance of our little fleet, and our boatman paddled us carefully and silently towards the animal, using the paddle only when its head was down. He would feed for a minute or two and then look carefully all around him. Of us he took no particular notice, although we were within a hundred and fifty yards of him; and even when we were within sixty yards he seemed to regard us only as a log floating upon the water, or something else which might be regarded as perfectly harmless. Spalding was in the bow of the boat, and when within some eight rods of the game, we lay perfectly quiet for a moment, when his rifle spoke out and its voice rung and re-echoed among the surrounding hills as if a whole platoon of musketry were blazing all around us. The deer made three or four desperate leaps in a zigzag direction, and then went down. When we got to him, he was dead. He was a fine two year old buck, with spike horns, and in excellent condition. We took his saddle and skin and passed on.
From Bound Pond we rowed up the inlet, a broad and sluggish stream, full of grass and lily pads, to Little Tapper's Lake. We saw several deer feeding along the shore that, discovering us as we rowed carelessly along, went whistling and snorting away into the forest. As we approached the lake, dark clouds gathered in the West; great ugly looking thunderheads came rolling up from behind the hills higher and higher; perfect stillness was all around us; the leaves were moveless on the trees, and the voices of the birds were hushed.