were stricken with universal death, and buried by nature, deep in her teeming bosom, to flourish presently in the veins of plants—­the plants to die again, and be dug, long ages after, from our deep coal-fields.  These thoughts towards nature, towards the marvellous records of an antiquity, the remoteness of which we cannot realise, will rise to the minds of all visitors who can see in the vast collection of animal life through which we have guided them, revelations of the endless forms and the endless beauties that pass often unnoticed, because not understood, under every step that man takes in the many journeys that lie between his hopeful cradle and his inevitable grave.

End of the first visit.

VISIT THE SECOND.

On entering the British Museum for the second time, the visitor should ascend the great staircase, pass through the south, central, and mammalia saloons; traverse the eastern zoological gallery, and continue north, direct into the first room of the most northern gallery of the northern wing;—­where the studies of his second visit should begin.  His first visit was occupied in the examination of the varieties of animal life distributed throughout the surface of the globe.  The greater part of his time on this occasion will be devoted to the study of the wonders that lie under the surface of the earth; of the revelations of extinct animal life made by impressible rocks; and of the metallic wealth which human ingenuity has adapted to the wants and luxuries of mankind.  In the fossil remains he will be able to recognise traces of an animal life, of which we have no living specimens; of trees, the like of which never rise from the bosom of the soil at the present time.  The lessons that lie in these indistinct, disjointed revelations of the remote past, are pregnant with matter for earnest thought to all men.  They are part of our history—­links that hold us to the sources of things, and recall us again and again to the condition of our universe, as it trembled into space, and as now we inhabit it—­a great and marvellous globe, every grain of which has an unfathomable story in it.  Philosophers have laboured long at the story of the earth; and their revelations have tended to settle it, in a form not unlike the following:—­

Originally, within the space bounded by the orbit of Uranus, a gaseous matter was diffused at a high temperature.  By laws, the origin of which we have not yet traced, the condition of the diffused heat was changed, and the particles of the gaseous matter, condensed and agglomerated by attraction, into a series of planets, of which our earth is the third in point of size.  That the earth has undergone vast changes, is evident to the most superficial geological student.  We are only able to investigate the crust of the earth, with all our ingenious boring instruments:  but even in this crust we may trace