Do not imagine that the Eternal Father creates at once a human race on each globe. The first step in the ladder of the animal kingdom receives the human transfiguration by force of circumstance, and by natural law, which ennobles it, as soon as progress has brought it to a state of relative superiority. The development of life. It is because the quadrupeds, the mammalia, which preceded the appearance of man on the Earth, had them already. The earthly animal kingdom has followed, from its origin, this continuous and progressive march towards the perfection of its typical forms of mammalia, freeing itself more and more from the grossness of its material.
Man is more beautiful than the horse, the horse than the bear, the bear than the tortoise.
A similar law governs the vegetable kingdom. Heavy, coarse vegetables without leaves and without flowers began the series. Then, as the ages advanced, their forms became more pure, and graceful leaves appeared filling the woods with silent shadows. Flowers in their turn began to beautify the gardens of the Earth, and spread sweet perfumes in an atmosphere until then insipid. To the scrutinising eye of the geologist who visits these tertiary, secondary, and primordial districts, this double progressive series of two kingdoms is to be seen to this day.