me some little care to trace the individual lines. At least one of the number, however,—consisting of eleven footprints of the right and as many of the left foot—I was able to trace from side to side of the working, a distance of four yards; and several of the others for shorter spaces. The prints, which were reverses or casts in a very coarse sandstone, were about thirtecn inches apart across the creature's chest, and rather more than a foot apart from its fore to its hinder limbs. They were alternately larger and smaller,—the smaller (those of the fore feet) measuring about four inches in length, and the larger (those of the hinder feet) about six inches. The number of toes seemed to be alternately four and five; but from the circumstance that the original matrix on which the tracks had been impressed,—a micaceous clay resolved into a loose fissile sandstone,—had fallen away in the working of the pit, leaving but the boldly-relieved though ill-defined casts on the coarse sandstone, I could not definitely determine the point. Enough, however, remained to show that at that spot,—little more than a mile from where the Duke of Buccleuch's palace now stands,—large reptiles had congregated in considerable numbers shortly after the great eight feet coal seam of the Dalkeith basin had been formed. In another part of the pit I found foot-tracks of apparently the same animal in equal abundance, but still less distinct in their state of keeping. But they bore testimony with the others to the comparative abundance of reptilian life at an early period, when the coal-bearing strata of the empire were little more than half deposited. It was not, however, until the Permian and Triassic Systems had come to a close, and even the earlier ages of the Oolitic System had passed away, that the class received its fullest development in creation. And certainly very wonderful was the development which it then did receive. Reptiles became everywhere the lords and masters of this lower world. When any class of the air-breathing vertebrates is very largely developed, we find it taking possession of all the three old terrestrial elements,—earth, air, and water. The human period, for instance, like that which immediately preceded it, is peculiarly a period of mammals; and we find the class, free, if I may so express myself, of the three elements, disputing possession of the sea with the fishes, in its Cetaceans, its seals, and its sea-lions, and of the air with the birds, in its numerous genera of the bat family. Further, not until the great mammaliferous period is fairly ushered in do either the bats or the whales make their appearance in creation. Remains of Oolitic reptiles have been mistaken in more than one instance for those of Cetacea; but it is now generally held that the earliest known specimens of the family belong to the Tertiary ages, while those of the oldest bats occur in the Eocene of the Paris Basin, associated with the bones of dolphins, lamantines, and morses. Now, in the times of the Oolite it was the reptilian class that possessed itself of all the elements. Its gigantic enaliosaurs, huge reptilian whales mounted on paddles, were the tyrants of the ocean, and must have reigned supreme over the already reduced class of fishes; its pterodactyles,—dragons as strange as were ever feigned by romancer of the middle ages, and that to the jaws and teeth of the crocodile added the wings of a bat and the body and tail of an ordinary mammal, had "the power of the air," and, pursuing the fleetest insects in their flight, captured and bore them down;[14] its lakes and rivers abounded in crocodiles and fresh water tortoises of ancient type and fashion; and its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian fauna, of what has been well termed "fearfully great lizards,"—some of which, such as the iguanodon, rivalled the largest elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in length and bulk. Judging from what remains, it seems not improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic period were quite as numerous individually, and consisted of well nigh as many genera and species, as all the mammals of the present time. In the cretaceous ages, the class, though still the dominant one, is visibly reduced in its standing; it had reached its culminating point in the Oolite, and then began to decline; and with the first dawn of the Tertiary division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate place in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its times of humiliation and decay that one of the most remarkable of its orders appears,—an order itself illustrative of extreme degradation, and which figures largely, in every scheme of mythology that borrowed through traditional channels from Divine revelation, as a meet representative of man's great enemy the Evil One. I of course refer to the ophidian or serpent family. The earliest ophidian remains known to the Palaeontologist occur in that ancient deposit of the Tertiary division known as the London Clay, and must have belonged to serpents, some of them allied to the Pythons, some to the sea-snakes, which, judging from the corresponding parts of recent species, must have been from fourteen to twenty feet in length.



And here let us again pause for a moment, to remark how strangely these irascible, repulsive reptiles,—creatures lengthened out far beyond the proportions of the other members of their class by mere vegetative repetitions of the vertebrae,—condemned to derive, worm-like, their ability of progressive motion from the ring-like scutes of the abdomen—venomous in many of their species,—formidable in others to even the noblest animals, from their fascinating powers and their great craft,—without, fore or hinder limbs, without thoracic or pelvic arches,—the very types and exemplars (our highest naturalists being the judges) of the extreme of animal degradation,—let us, I say, remark how strangely their history has been mixed up with that of man and of religion in all the older mythologies, and in that Divine Revelation whence the older mythologies were derived. It was one of the most ancient of the Phoenician fables, that the great antagonist of the gods was a gigantic serpent, that had at one time been their subject, but revolted against them and became their enemy. It was a monstrous serpent that assailed and strove to destroy the mother of Apollo ere yet the birth of the god, but which, long after, Apollo in turn assaulted and slew. It was a great serpent that watched over the apples of the Hesperides, and that Hercules, ere he could possess himself of the fruit, had to combat and kill. It was a frightful serpent that guarded the golden fleece from Jason, and which the hero had to destroy in the first instance, and next to exterminate the strange brood of armed men that sprang up from its sown teeth. In short, the old mythologies are well nigh as full of the serpent as those ancient Runic obelisks of our country, whose endless knots and complicated fretwork are formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, however, accept as representative of this innumerable class of legends, the classical story, rendered yet more classical by the profound and reverend comment given by Bacon in his "Wisdom of the Ancients." "Jupiter and the other gods," says the philosopher, in his simple version of the tradition, "conferred upon men a most acceptable and desirable boon,—the gift of perpetual youth. But men, foolishly overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon an ass, who, in returning back with it, being extremely thirsty, and coming to a fountain, the serpent who was guardian thereof would not suffer him to drink but upon condition of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it should be. The silly ass complied; and thus the perpetual renewal of youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the race of serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth should pass from men to serpents," continues Bacon, "seems added, by way of ornament and illustration, to the fable." And it certainly has much the appearance of an after-thought. But how very striking the resemblance, borne by the story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page of human history which exhibits the first parents of the race as yielding up to the temptation of the serpent the gift of immortality; and further, how remarkable the fact, that the reptile selected as typical here of the great fallen spirit that kept not his first estate, should be at once the reptile of latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by philosophical naturalists as representative of a reversed process in the course of being,—of a downward, sinking career, from the vertebrate antetype towards greatly lower types in the invertebrate divisions! The fallen spirit is represented in revelation by what we are now taught to recognize in science as a degraded reptile.



Birds make their first appearance in a Red Sandstone deposit of the United States in the valley of the Connecticut, which was at one time supposed to belong to the Triassic System, but which is now held to be at least not older than the times of the Lias. No fragments of the skeletons of birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the Chalk: the Connecticut remains are those of footprints exclusively; and yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far as it extends, with remarkable precision and distinctness. They were apparently all of the Grallae or stilt order of birds,—an order to which the cranes, herons, and bustards belong, with the ostriches and cassowaries, and which is characterized by possessing but three toes on each foot (one species of ostrich has but two), or, if a fourth toe be present, so imperfectly is it developed in most of the cases, that it fails to reach the ground. And in almost all the footprints of the primeval birds of the Connecticut there are only three toes exhibited. Peculiar, ill understood laws regulate the phalangal divisions of the various animals. It is a law of the human kind, for instance, that the thumb should consist of but three phalanges; while the fingers, even the smallest, consist of four. And, in the same way, it is a law generally exemplified among birds, that of the three toes which correspond to the fingers, the inner toe should be composed of three phalanges, the middle or largest toe of four phalanges, and the outer toe, though but second in point of size, of five phalanges. Such is the law now, and such was equally the law, as shown by the American footprints, in the times of the Lias. Some of the impressions are of singular distinctness. Every claw and phalange has left its mark in the stone; while the trifid termination of the tarso-metatarsal bone leaves three marks more,—fifteen in all,—the true ornithic number. In some of the specimens even the pressure of a metatarsal brush, still possessed by some birds, is distinctly traceable; nay, there are instances in which the impress of the dermoid papillae has remained as sharply as if made in wax. But the immense size of some of these footprints served to militate for a time against belief in their ornithic origin. The impressions that are but secondary in point of size greatly exceed those of the hugest birds which now exist; while those of the largest class equal the prints of the bulkier quadrupeds. There are tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of Connecticut that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer to the inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance apart in the straight line, a stride of about six feet in the creature that impressed them in these ancient sands,—measurements that might well startle zoologists who had derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing birds exclusively. Comparatively recent discoveries have, however, if not lessened, at least familiarized us to the wonder. In a deposit of New Zealand that dates little if at all in advance of the human period, there have been detected the remains of birds scarce inferior in size to those of America in the Liassic ages. The bones of the Dinornus giganteus, exhibited by the late Dr. Mantell in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1850, greatly exceeded in bulk those of the largest horse. A thigh bone sixteen inches in length measured nearly nine inches in circumference in the middle of the shaft: the head of a tibia measured twenty-one inches in circumference. It was estimated that a foot entire in all its parts, which formed an interesting portion of the exhibition, would, when it was furnished with nails, and covered by the integuments, have measured about fifteen inches in length; and it was calculated by a very competent authority, Professor Owen, that of the other bones of the leg to which it belonged, the tibia must have been about two feet nine inches, and the femur about fourteen and a half inches long. The larger thigh bone referred to must have belonged, it was held, to a bird that stood from eleven to twelve feet high,—the extreme height of the great African elephant. Such were the monster birds of a comparatively recent period; and their remains serve to render credible the evidence furnished by the great footprints of their remote predecessors of the Lias. The huge feet of the greatest Dinornus whose bones have yet been found would have left impressions scarcely an inch shorter than those of the still huger birds of the Connecticut. Is it not truly wonderful, that in this late age of the world, in which the invention of the poets seems to content itself with humbler and lowlier flights than of old, we should thus find the facts of geology fully rivalling, in the strange and the outre, the wildest fancies of the romancers who flourished in the middle ages? I have already referred to flying dragons,—real existences of the Oolitic period,—that were quite as extraordinary of type, if not altogether so huge of bulk, as those with which the Seven Champions of Christendom used to do battle; and here are we introduced to birds of the Liassic ages that were scarce less gigantic than the roc of Sinbad the Sailor. They are fraught with strange meanings these footprints of the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a nameless lake, to wade into its shallows in quest of mail-covered fishes of the ancient type, or long-extinct molluscs; while reptiles equally gigantic, and of still stranger proportions, haunted the neighboring swamps and savannahs; and when the same sun that shone on the tall moving forms beside the waters, and threw their long shadows across the red sands, lighted up the glades of deep forests, all of whose fantastic productions,—tree, bush, and herb,—have even in their very species long since passed away. And of this scene of things only the footprints remain,—"footprints on the sands of time," that tell us, among other matters, whence the graceful American poet derived his quiet but singularly effective and unmistakeably indigenous figure:—

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sand of time. Footprints that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again."



With the Stonisfield slates,—a deposit which lies above what is known as the Inferior Oolite,—the remains of mammaliferous animals first appear. As, however, no other mammalian remains occur until after the close of the great Secondary Division, and as certain marked peculiarities attach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to inquire whether their place, so far in advance of their fellows, may not be indicative of a radical difference of character,—a difference considerable enough to suggest to the zoologist an improvement in his scheme of classification. It has been shown by Professor Owen,—our highest authority in comparative anatomy,—that while one Stonisfield genus unequivocally belonged to the marsupial order, another of its genera bears also certain of the marsupial traits; and that the group which they composed,—a very small one, and consisting exclusively of minute insect-eating animals,—exhibits in its general aspect the characteristics of this pouched family. Even the genus of the group that least resembles them was pronounced by Cuvier to have its nearest affinities with the opossums. And let us mark how very much may be implied in this circumstance. In the "Animal Kingdom" of the great naturalist just named, the marsupiata, or pouched animals, are made to occupy the fourth place among the nine orders of the Mammalia; but should they not rather occupy a place intermediate between the placental mammals and the birds? and does not nature indicate their true position by the position which she assigns to them in the geologic scale? The birds are oviparous; and between the extrusion of the egg and the development of the perfect young bird they have to hatch it into life during a long period of incubation. The marsupiata are not oviparous, for their eggs want the enveloping shell or skin; but they, too, are extruded in an exceedingly rudimentary and foetal state, and have to undergo in the pouch a greatly longer period of incubation than that demanded by nature for any bird whatever. The young kangaroo is extruded, after it has remained for little more than a month in the womb, as a foetus scarcely an inch in length by somewhat less than half an inch in breadth: it is blind, exhibiting merely dark eye spots; its limbs are so rudimentary, that even the hinder legs, so largely developed in the genus when mature, exist as mere stumps; it is unable even to suck, but, holding permanently on by a minute dug, has the sustaining fluid occasionally pressed into its mouth by the mother. And, undergoing a peculiar but not the less real process of incubation, the creature that had to remain for little more than a month in the womb,—strictly thirty-nine days,—has to remain in the mother's pouch, ere it is fully developed and able to provide for itself, for a period of eight months. It is found to increase in weight during this hatching process, from somewhat less than an ounce to somewhat more than eight pounds. Now, this surely is a process quite as nearly akin to the incubation of egg-bearing birds as to the ordinary nursing process of the placental mammals; and on the occult but apparently real principle, that the true arrangement of the animal kingdom is that which we find exemplified by the successive introduction of its various classes and orders in the course of geologic history, should we not anticipate a point of time for the introduction of the marsupiata, intermediate between the widely-distant points at which the egg-bearing birds and the true placental mammals appeared? Ranged at once chronologically, and by their mode of reproduction, the various classes of the vertebrata would run, did we accept the suggested reading, as follows:—First appear cold-blooded vertebrates (fishes), that propagate by eggs or spawn,—chiefly by the latter. Next appear cold-blooded vertebrates (reptiles), that propagate by eggs or spawn,—chiefly by the former. Then appear warm-blooded vertebrates (birds), that propagate by eggs exclusively. Then warm-blooded vertebrates come upon the stage, that produce eggs without shells, which have to be subjected for months to a species of extra-placental incubation. And last of all the true placental mammals appear. And thus, tried by the test of perfect reproduction, the great vertebral division receives its full development in creation.



The placental mammals make their appearance, as I have said, in the earliest ages of the great Tertiary division, and exhibit in the group an aspect very unlike that which they at present bear. The Eocene ages were peculiarly the ages of the Palaeotheres,—strange animals of that pachydermatous or thick-skinned order to which the elephants, the tapirs, the hogs, and the horses belong. It had been remarked by naturalists, that there are fewer families of this order in living nature than of almost any other, and that, of the existing genera, not a few are widely separated in their analogies from the others. But in the Palaeotheres of the Eocene, which ranged in size from a large horse to a hare, not a few of the missing links have been found,—links connecting the tapirs to the hogs, and the hogs to the Palaeotheres proper; and there is at least one species suggestive of an union of some of the more peculiar traits of the tapirs and the horses. It was among these extinct Pachydermata of the Paris basin that Cuvier effected his wonderful restorations, and produced those figures in outline which are now as familiar to the geologist as any of the forms of the existing animals. The London Clay and the Eocene of the Isle of Wight have also yielded numerous specimens of those pachyderms, whose identity with the Continental ones has been established by Owen; but they are more fragmentary, and their state of keeping less perfect, than those furnished by the gypsum quarries of Velay and Montmartre. In these the smaller animals occur often in a state of preservation so peculiar and partial as to excite the curiosity of even the untaught workmen. Only half the skeleton is present. The limbs and ribs of the under side are found lying in nearly their proper places; while of the limbs and ribs of the upper side usually not a trace can be detected,—even the upper side of the skull is often awanting. It-would almost seem as if some pre-Adamite butcher had divided the carcasses longitudinally, and carried away with him all the upper halves. The reading of the enigma seems to be, that when the creatures lay down and died, the gypsum in which their remains occur was soft enough to permit their under sides to sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different species of extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin,—not a great number, it may be thought; and yet for so limited a locality we may deem it not a very small one, when we take into account the fact that all our native mammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according to Fleming), if we except the Cetaceae and the seals, to but forty species.



(Eocene.)]



In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though of a wholly different type from their predecessors, are still the prevailing forms. The Dinotherium, one of the greatest quadrupedal mammals that ever lived, seems to have formed a connecting link in this middle age between the Pachydermata and the Cetaceae. Each ramus of the under jaw, which in the larger specimens are fully four feet in length, bore at the symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards, which appears to have been employed as a pickaxe in uprooting the aquatic plants and liliaceous roots on which the creature seems to have lived. The head, which measured about three feet across,—a breadth, sufficient, surely, to satisfy the demands of the most exacting phrenologist,—was provided with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to give potent effect to the operations of this strange tool. The hinder part of the skull not a little resembled that of the Cetaceae; while, from the form of the nasal bones, the creature was evidently furnished with a trunk like the elephant. It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a sort of uniting tie between creatures still associated in the human mind, from the circumstance of their massive proportions, as the greatest that swim the sea or walk the land,—the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an elephantoid animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and trunk, but marked by certain peculiarities which constitute it a different genus, seems in Europe to have been contemporary with the Dinotherium; but in North America (the scene of its greatest numerical development) it appears to belong to a later age. In height it did not surpass the African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in length,—a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet high indicating a length of about twenty-five feet: it had what the elephants want,—tusks fixed in its lower jaw, which the males retained through life, but the females lost when young; its limbs were proportionally shorter, but more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim; its grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to weigh from seventeen to twenty pounds, and their cusps elevated into great mammae-like protuberances, to which the creature owes its name, and wholly differ in their proportions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe than in America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is one of many facts that seem to indicate a general transposition of at least the later geologic ages on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Groups of corresponding character on the eastern and western shores of this great ocean were not contemporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly remarked, that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and construction the marks of a much greater antiquity than those of Europe. The geologist who sets himself to discover similar types on the eastern side of the Atlantic would have to seek for them among the deposits of the later Tertiaries. North America seems to be still passing through its later Tertiary ages; and it appears to be a consequence of this curious transposition, that while in Europe the mastodonic period is removed by two great geologic eras from the present time, it is removed from it in America by only one. Even in America, however, that period lies far beyond the reach of human tradition,—a fact borne out by the pseudo-traditions retailed by the aborigines regarding the mastodon. By none of at least the higher naturalists has there been a doubt entertained respecting its herbivorous character; and the discovery of late years of the stomach of an individual charged with decayed herbage and fragments of the succulent branches of trees, some of them of existing species, has demonstrated the solidity of the reasonings founded on its general structure and aspect. The pseudo-traditions, however, represent it in every instance as a carnivorous tyrant, that, had it not been itself destroyed, would have destroyed all the other animals its contemporaries. It is said by the red men of Virginia, "that a troop of these tremendous quadrupeds made fearful havoc for some time among the deer, the buffaloes, and all the other animals created for the use of the Indians, and spread desolation far and wide. At last 'the Mighty Man above' seized his thunder and killed them all, with the exception of the largest of the males, who presenting his head to the thunderbolts, shook them off as they fell; but, being wounded in the side, he betook himself to flight towards the great lakes, where he still resides at the present day."

Let me here remind you in the passing, that that antiquity of type which characterizes the recent productions of North America is one of many wonders,—not absolutely geological in themselves, but which, save for the revelations of geology, would have forever remained unnoted and unknown,—which have been pressed, during the last half century, on the notice of naturalists. "It is a circumstance quite extraordinary and unexpected," says Agassiz, in his profoundly interesting work on Lake Superior, "that the fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North America, than those of any other parts of the world; thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States, are, as it were, old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera Lagomys, Chelydra, and the large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils of Oeningen, are at least equally so;—they bear the marks of former ages." How strange a fact! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contradistinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its acceptations, is America an older world still,—an older world than that of the eastern continents,—an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him,—the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,—the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,—the lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the neighboring creek to drink,—the fierce alligator-like tortoise, with the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water,—and the little hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,—all attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old a country the seemingly new one really is,—a country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose perished productions we find locked up in the loess of the Rhine, or amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the Old World. If we accept, however, as sound the ingenious logic by which Colton labors to show, in not inelegant verse, that the Moderns are the true Ancients, we may continue to term it the New World still.

"We that on these late days are thrown Must be the oldest Ancients known; The earliest Modern earth hath seen Was Adam in his apron green. He lived when young Creation pealed Her morning hymn o'er flood and field, Till all her infant offspring came To that great christening for a name. And he that would the Ancients know, Must forward come, not backward go: The learned lumber of the shelves Shows nothing older than ourselves. But who in older times than we Shall live?—That infant on the knee,— See sights to us were never shown, And secrets known to us unknown."



The group of mammals which, in Europe, at least, immediately preceded the human period seems to have been everywhere a remarkable one; and nowhere was it more so than in the British islands. Our present mammaliferous fauna is rather poor; but the contents of the later deposits show that we must regard it as but a mere fragment of a very noble one. Associated with species that still exist in the less cultivated parts of the country, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, the roe and the red deer, we find the remains of great animals, whose congeners must now be sought for in the intertropical regions. Britain, during the times of the boulder clay, and for ages previous, had its native elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyaena, its tiger, its three species of bears, its two species of beavers, its great elk, and its gigantic deer. Forms now found widely apart, and in very different climates, meet within the British area. During at least the earlier times of the group, the temperature of our island seems to have been very much what it is now. As I have already had occasion to remark, the British oak flourished on its plains and lower slopes, and the birch and Scotch fir on its hills. And yet under these familiar trees the lagomys or tailless hare, a form now mainly restricted to Siberia and the wilds of Northern America, and the reindeer, an animal whose proper habitat at the present time is Lapland, were associated with forms that are now only to be found between the tropics, such as that of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros. These last, however, unequivocally of extinct species, seem to have been adapted to live in a temperate climate; and we know from the famous Siberian specimen, that the British elephant, with its covering of long hair and closely-felted wool, was fitted to sustain the rigors of a very severe one. It is surely a strange fact, but not less true than strange, that since hill and dale assumed in Britain their present configuration, and the oak and birch flourished in its woods, there were caves in England haunted for ages by families of hyaenas,—that they dragged into their dens with the carcasses of long extinct animals those of the still familiar denizens of our hill-sides, and feasted, now on the lagomys, and now on the common hare,—that they now fastened on the beaver or the reindeer, and now upon the roebuck or the goat. In one of these caves, such of the bones as projected from the stiff soil have been actually worn smooth in a narrow passage where the hyaenas used to come in contact with them in passing out and in; and for several feet in depth the floor beneath is composed almost exclusively of gnawed fragments, that still exhibit the deeply indented marks of formidable teeth. In the famous Kirkdale cave alone, parts of the skeletons of from two to three hundred hyaenas have been detected, mixed with portions of the osseous framework of the cave-tiger, the cave-bear, the ox, the deer, the mammoth, and the rhinoceros. That cave must have been a den of wild creatures for many ages ere the times of the boulder clay, during which period it was shut up from all access to the light and air by a drift deposit, and lay covered over until again laid open by some workmen little more than thirty years ago. Not only were many of the wild animals of the country which still exist contemporary for a time with its extinct bears, tigers, and elephants, but it seems at least highly probable that several of our domesticated breeds derived their origin from progenitors whose remains we find entombed in the bone-caves and other deposits of the same age; though of course the changes effected by domestication in almost all the tame animals renders the question of their identity with the indigenous breeds somewhat obscure. Cuvier was, however, unable to detect any difference between the skeleton of a fossil horse, contemporary with the elephant, and that of our domestic breed: a fossil goat of the same age cannot be distinguished from the domesticated animal; and one of our two fossil oxen (Bos longifrons) does not differ more from some of the existing breeds than these have, in the course of time, been made, chiefly by artificial means, to differ among themselves. But of one of our domestic tribes no trace has yet been found in the rocks: like the cod family among fishes, or the Rosaceae among plants, it seems to have preceded man by but a very brief period. And certainly, if created specially for his use, though the pride of the herald might prevent him from selecting it as in aught typical of the human race, it would yet not be easy to instance a family of animals that has ministered more extensively to his necessities. I refer to the sheep,—that soft and harmless creature, that clothes civilized man everywhere in the colder latitudes with its fleece,—that feeds him with its flesh,—that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with which he refits his musical instruments,—whose horns he has learned to fashion into a thousand useful trinkets,—and whose skin, converted into parchment, served to convey to later times the thinking of the first full blow of the human intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle ages.

At length the human period begins. A creature appears upon the scene unlike all that had preceded him, and whose nature it equally is to look back upon the events of the past,—among other matters, on that succession of beings upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we are this evening attempting to deal,—and to anticipate at least one succession more, in that still future state in which he himself is again to appear, in happier circumstances than now, and in a worthier character. We possess another history of the primeval age and subsequent chronology of the human family than that which we find inscribed in the rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, the geologic evidence regarding the period of man's first appearance on earth is singularly obscure. That custom of "burying his dead out of his sight," which obtained, we know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in use ever since man came first under the law of death, has had the effect of mingling his remains with those of creatures that were extinct for ages ere he began to be. The cavern, once a haunt of carnivorous animals, that in the first simple ages of his history had furnished him with a shelter when living, became his burying-place when dead; and thus his bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon-making, have been found associated with the remains of the cave-hyaena and cave-tiger, with the teeth of the ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of the primeval elephant. The evidence on the point, too,—from the great paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote period, and from the circumstance that they are rarely seen by geologists in the stratum in which they occur,—is usually very imperfect in its details. Further, it is an evidence obnoxious to suspicion, from the fact that a keen controversy has arisen on the subject of man's antiquity, that such fragments of man himself or of his works as manifest great age have been pressed to serve as weapons in the fray,—that, occurring always in superficial and local deposits, their true era may be greatly antedated, under the influence of prejudice, by men who have no design wilfully to deceive,—and that while, respecting the older formations, with their abundant organisms, the conclusions of any one geologist may be tested by all the others, the geologist who once in a lifetime picks up in a stratified sand or clay a stone arrow-head or a human bone, finds that the data on which he founds his conclusions may be received or rejected by his contemporaries, but not re-examined. It may be safely stated, however, that that ancient record in which man is represented as the lastborn of creation, is opposed by no geologic fact; and that if, according to Chalmers, "the Mosaic writings do not fix the antiquity of the globe," they at least do fix—making allowance, of course, for the varying estimates of the chronologer—"the antiquity of the human species." The great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form,—at once hieroglyphic and figure,—bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, which imparts beauty and finish to the whole, reasoning, responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful harmony manifested in the proportions of that nice sequence in which the invertebrates—the fishes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of all, man himself—are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,—a figure which, viewed in the light cast on it by the modern science of Palaeontology, stands out in bolder relief than that in which it could have appeared to the poet himself:—

"From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began; From harmony to harmony, Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man."



In the limits to which I have restricted myself, I have been able to do little more than simply to chronicle the successive eras in which the various classes and divisions of the organic kingdom, vegetable and animal, make their appearance in creation. I have produced merely a brief record of the various births, in their order, of that great family whose father is God. And in pursuing such a plan, much, of necessity, must have been omitted. I ought perhaps to have told you, that very rarely, if ever, do the master forms of a period constitute the prevailing or typical organisms of its deposits. Of the three great divisions of which the geologic scale consists,—Palaeozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary,—the first, or ichthyic period, is marked chiefly, not by its great fishes, but by the peculiar character of its brachipodous and cephalopodous mollusca, and in its earlier stages by its three-lobed crustaceae; the second or reptilian period was emphatically the period of the ammonite and belemnite; while the third and last, or mammalian period, was that of gastropodous and conchiferous molluscs, impressed, generically at least, by all the features of the group which still exists in our seas. Save in a few local deposits, fishes do not form the prevailing organisms in the formations of the age of fishes; nor reptiles in the formations of the age of reptiles; nor yet mammals in the formations of the age of mammals. Nay, it is not improbable that the recent or human period may be marked most prominently in the future, when it comes to exist simply as a geologic system, by a still humbler organism than most of these molluscs. On almost all rocky shores a line of pale gray may be seen at low water, running for mile after mile along the belt that has been laid bare at the bases of the cliffs by the fall of the tide. It owes its pale color to millions of millions of a small balanus (B. balanoides), produced in such amazing abundance in the littoral zone as to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of rock and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same genus (B. crenatus and B. porcatus) occupy the depths of the sea beyond; and their remains, washed ashore by the waves, and mingled with those of the littoral species, form often great accumulations of shell sand. I have seen among the Hebrides a shell sand accumulated along the beach to the depth of many feet, of which fully two thirds was composed of the valves and compartments of balanidae; and a similar sand on the east coast of Scotland, a little to the south of St. Andrews, formed in still larger proportions of the fragments of a single species,—Balanus crenatus. Now, this genus, so amazingly abundant at the present time in every existing sea, and whose accumulated remains bid fair to exist as great limestone rocks in the future, had no existence in the Palaeozoic or Secondary ages. It first appears in the times of the earlier Tertiary, in, however, only a single species; and, becoming gradually of more and more importance as a group, it receives its fullest numerical development in the present time. And thus the remains of a sub-class of animals, low in their standing among the articulata, may form one of the most prominent Palaeontological features of the human period. But enough for the present of circumstance and detail.



Such, so far as the geologist has yet been able to read the records of his science, has been the course of creation, from the first beginnings of vitality upon our planet, until the appearance of man. And very wonderful, surely, has that course been! How strange a procession! Never yet on Egyptian obelisk or Assyrian frieze,—where long lines of figures seem stalking across the granite, each charged with symbol and mystery,—have our Layards or Rawlinsons seen aught so extraordinary as that long procession of being which, starting out of the blank depths of the bygone eternity, is still defiling across the stage, and of which we ourselves form some of the passing figures. Who shall declare the profound meanings with which these geologic hieroglyphics are charged, or indicate the ultimate goal at which the long procession is destined to arrive?

The readings already given, the conclusions already deduced, are as various as the hopes and fears, the habits of thought, and the cast of intellect, of the several interpreters who have set themselves,—some, alas! with but little preparation and very imperfect knowledge,—to declare in their order the details of this marvellous, dream-like vision, and, with the dream, "the interpretation thereof." One class of interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed old man,—the genius of unbelief so poetically described by Coleridge,—who, sitting in his cold and dreary cave, "talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of blind men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he of the next, and so on, till they were all out of sight, and that they all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step, though all were alike blind." With these must I class those assertors of the development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of being only the operations of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through which, in the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families have risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in virtue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, without thought or care on its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law, from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,—from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;—the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher at every step.

Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,—the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,—which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,—dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,—a universe of death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also, and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save as stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock forever? Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets:—

"Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams, So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life? 'So careful of the type!' but no, From scarped cliff and quarried stone, She cries, 'A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing; all shall go: Thou makest thine appeal to me; I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath. I know no more.' And he,—shall he, Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies And built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed, And love creation's final law, Though Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravine shrieked against his creed,— Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the true, the just,— Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills? No more!—a monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tore each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with him. O, life, as futile then as frail,— O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer or redress, Behind the vail, behind the vail!"

The sagacity of the poet here,—that strange sagacity which seems so nearly akin to the prophetic spirit,—suggests in this noble passage the true reading of the enigma. The appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes a new era in creation; the operations of a new instinct come into play,—that instinct which anticipates a life after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and good, who is the pledged "rewarder of all who diligently seek Him." And in looking along the long line of being,—ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom instinct never deceives,—can we hold that man, immeasurably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations, than all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand error in creation,—the one painful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter,—the befooled expectant of a happy future, which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures,—who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare,—will to a certainty not break faith with man,—with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying-grounds, and other tombs,—solitary churchyards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us, that while their burial-yards contain but the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seed of the future.



LECTURE THIRD.

THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL.

It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church, engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm. The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."

The bold lecturer on this occasion,—for it needed no small courage in a divine of any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the present century, a position so determined on the geologic side,—was at the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the small circle in which he moved, by the ardor of his temperament and the breadth and originality of his views; but not yet distinguished in the science or literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the theological field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer acquaintance deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was all but universal, he held and taught that free trade would be not only a general benefit to the people of this country, but would inflict permanent injury on no one class or portion of them; and further, at a time when the streets and lanes of all the great cities of the empire were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time was not distant when a carburetted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead; and, on getting his snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually introduced into the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage into its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the illuminating agent. Time and experience have since impressed their stamp on these supposed eccentricities, and shown them to be the sagacious forecastings of a man who saw further and more clearly than his contemporaries; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer of St. Andrews was Dr. Thomas Chalmers,—a divine whose writings are now known wherever the English language is spoken, and whose wonderful eloquence lives in memory as a vanished power, which even his extraordinary writings fail adequately to represent. And in the position which he took up at this early period with respect to geology and the Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity of the man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of the evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the geologist was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his science. Even in this late age, when the scientific standing of geology is all but universally recognized, and the vast periods of time which it demands fully conceded, neither geologist nor theologian, could, in any new scheme of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. It has formed since that time the preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at once science and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and Professor Sedgwick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Binney,—enlightened and distinguished men, who all came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. Andrews, that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."

In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lectures, Dr. Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of reconciliation between the Divine and the Geologic Records, in a "Review of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth;" and that scheme, perfectly adequate to bring the Mosaic narrative into harmony with what was known at the time of geologic history, has been very extensively received and adopted. It may, indeed, still be regarded as the most popular of the various existing schemes. It teaches, and teaches truly, that between the first act of creation, which evoked out of the previous nothing the matter of the heavens and earth, and the first act of the first day's work recorded in Genesis, periods of vast duration may have intervened; but further, it insists that the days themselves were but natural days of twenty-four hours each; and that, ere they began, the earth, though mayhap in the previous period a fair residence of life, had become void and formless, and the sun, moon, and stars, though mayhap they had before given light, had been, at least in relation to our planet, temporarily extinguished. In short, while it teaches that the successive creations of the geologist may all have found ample room in the period preceding that creation to which man belongs, it teaches also that the record in Genesis bears reference to but the existing creation, and that there lay between it and the preceding ones a chaotic period of death and darkness. The scheme propounded by the late Dr. Pye Smith, and since adopted by several writers, differs from that of Chalmers in but one circumstance, though an important one. Dr. Smith held, with the great northern divine, that the Mosaic days were natural days; that they were preceded by a chaotic period; and that the work done in them related to but that last of the creations to which the human species belongs. Further, however, he held in addition, that the chaos of darkness and confusion out of which that creation was called was of but limited extent, and that outside its area, and during the period of its existence, many of our present lands and seas may have enjoyed the light of the sun, and been tenanted by animals and occupied by plants, the descendants of which still continue to exist. The treatise of Dr. Pye Smith was published exactly a quarter of a century posterior to the promulgation, through the press, of the argument of Dr. Chalmers; and this important addition,—elaborated by its author between the years 1837 and 1839,—seems to have been made to suit the more advanced state of geological science at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so; and this mainly through a peculiarity in the order in which geological fact has been evolved and accumulated in this country, and the great fossiliferous systems studied and wrought out; to which I must be permitted briefly to advert.

William Smith, the "Father of English Geology," as he has been well termed (a humble engineer and mineral surveyor, possessed of but the ordinary education of men of his class and profession), was born upon the English Oolite,—that system which, among the five prevailing divisions of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath it; the Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child, had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed, that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of spherical fossil terebratulae, which served the purposes of the game equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a profession; and, when supporting himself in honest independence as a skilful mineral surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand miles of country, taking as his starting point the city of Bath, which stands near what is termed the Great Oolite: and from that centre he carefully explored the various Secondary formations above and below. He ascertained that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they run diagonally across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from north-east to south-west. And, devoting every hour which he could snatch from his professional labors to the work, in about a quarter of a century, or rather more, he completed his great stratigraphical map of England. But, though a truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single man unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even any very general sympathy in his labors, it was found to be chiefly valuable in its tracings of the Secondary deposits, and strictly exact in only that Oolitic centre from which his labors began. It was remarked at an early period that he ought to have restricted his publication to the formations which lie between the Chalk and the Red Marl inclusive; or, in other words, to the great Secondary division. The Coal Measures had, however, been previously better known, from their economic importance, and the number of the workings opened among them, than the deposits of any other system; and ere the publication of the map of Smith, Cuvier and Brogniart had rendered famous all over the world the older Tertiary formations of the age of the London Clay. But both ends of the geological scale, comprising those ancient systems older than the Coal, and representative of periods in which, so far as is yet known, life, animal and vegetable, first began upon our planet, and those systems of comparatively modern date, representative of the periods which immediately preceded the human epoch, were equally unknown. The light fell strongly on only that middle portion of the series on which the labors of Smith had been mainly concentrated. The vast geologic bridge, which, like that in the exquisite allegory of Addison, strode across a "part of the great tide of eternity," "had a black cloud hanging at each end of it." And such was the state of geologic science when, in 1814, Dr. Chalmers framed his scheme of reconciliation.

Since that time, however, a light not less strong than the one thrown by William Smith on the formations of the Lias and the Oolite has been cast on both the older and the newer fossiliferous systems. Two great gaps still remain to be filled up,—that which separates the Palaeozoic from the Secondary division, and that which separates the Secondary from the Tertiary one. But they occur at neither end of the geological scale. Mainly through the labors of two distinguished geologists, who, finding the geologic school of their own country distracted by a fierce and fruitless controversy, attached themselves to the geologic school of England, and have since received the honor of knighthood in acknowledgment of their labors, both ends of the geologic scale have been completed. Sir Roderick Murchison addressed himself to the formations older than the Coal, more especially to the Upper and Lower Silurian systems, from the Ludlow rooks to the Llandeilo flags. The Old Red Sandstone too, a system which lies more immediately beneath the Coal, has also been explored, and its various deposits, with their peculiar organic remains, enumerated and described. And Sir Charles Lyell, setting himself to the other extremity of the scale, has wrought out the Tertiary formations, and separated them into the four great divisions which they are now recognized as forming. And of these, the very names indicate that certain proportions of their organisms still continue to exist. It is a great fact, now fully established in the course of geological discovery, that between the plants which in the present time cover the earth, and the animals which inhabit it, and the animals and plants of the later extinct creations, there occurred no break or blank, but that, on the contrary, many of the existing organisms were contemporary during the morning of their being, with many of the extinct ones during the evening of theirs. We know further, that not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, and several of even the wild animals which continue to survive amid our tracts of hill and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age began. Instead of dating their beginning only a single natural day, or at most two natural days, in advance of man, they must have preceded him by many thousands of years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later systems and formations, through which we are led to know that the present creation was not cut off abruptly from the preceding one, but that, on the contrary, it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points, we are led also to know, that any scheme of reconciliation which would separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the progress of geological discovery, and is, as I have said, adequate no longer; and it becomes a not unimportant matter to determine the special scheme that would bring into completest harmony the course of creation, as now ascertained by the geologist, and that brief but sublime narrative of its progress which forms a meet introduction in Holy Writ to the history of the human family. The first question to which we must address ourselves in any such inquiry is of course a very obvious one,—What are the facts scientifically determined which now demand a new scheme of reconciliation?

There runs around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland a flat terrace of unequal breadth, backed by an escarpment of varied height and character, which is known to geologists as the old coast-line. On this flat terrace most of the seaport towns of the empire are built. The subsoil which underlies its covering of vegetable mould consists usually of stratified sands and gravels, arranged after the same fashion as on the neighboring beach, and interspersed in the same manner with sea shells. The escarpment behind, when formed of materials of no great coherency, such as gravel or clay, exists as a sloping, grass-covered bank,—at one place running out into promontories that encroach upon the terrace beneath,—at another receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,—in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep caverns,—in short, presenting all the appearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, no geologist can or does doubt that this escarpment was at one time the coast-line of the island,—the line against which the waves broke at high water in some distant age, when either the sea stood from twenty to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now, or the land sat from twenty to thirty feet lower. Nor can the geologist doubt, that along the flat terrace beneath, with its stratified beds of sand and gravel, and its accumulations of sea shells, the tides must have risen and fallen twice every day, as they now rise and fall along the beach that at present girdles our country. But, in reference to at least human history, the age of the old coast-line and terrace must be a very remote one. Though geologically recent, it lies far beyond the reach of any written record. It has been shown by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest authorities on the subject, that the wall of Antoninus, erected by the Romans as a protection against the Northern Caledonians, was made to terminate at the Firths of Forth and Clyde, with relation, not to the level of the old coast-line, but to that of the existing one. And so we must infer that, ere the year A.D. 140 (the year during which, according to our antiquaries, the greater part of the wall was erected) the old coast-line had attained to its present elevation over the sea. Further, however, we know from the history of Diodorus the Sicilian, that at a period earlier by at least two hundred years, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was connected with the mainland at low water, just as it is now, by a flat isthmus, across which, upon the falling of the tide, the ancient Cornish miners used to carry over their tin in carts. Had the relative levels of sea and land been those of the old coast-line at the time, St. Michael's Mount, instead of being accessible at low ebb would have been separated from the shore by a strait from three to five fathoms in depth. It would not have been then as now, as described in the verse of Carew,—

"Both land and island twice a day."

But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents generally marks of greater attrition than the modern line, and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably more profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of coast, the average profundity of both classes of caverns from a considerable number of each, I ascertained that the proportional average depth of the modern to the ancient is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the present coast-line, they must have been engaged for three centuries in scooping out those of the old one. But we know historically, that for at least twenty centuries the sea has been toiling in these modern caves; and who shall dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least ten centuries more? But if the sea has stood for but even two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line (and no geologist would dare fix his estimate lower), then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand nine hundred years. And both periods united (six thousand five hundred years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a mere starting point from the recent period. Not a single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand five hundred years! The shells which lie embedded in the subsoils beneath the old coast-line are exactly those which still live in our seas.



Above this ancient line of coast we find, at various heights, beds of shells of vastly older date than those of the low-lying terrace, and many of which are no longer to be found living around our shores. I spent some time last autumn in exploring one of these beds, once a sea bottom, but now raised two hundred and thirty feet over the sea, in which there occurred great numbers of shells now not British, though found in many parts of Britain at heights varying from two hundred to nearly fourteen hundred feet over the existing sea level. But though no longer British shells, they are shells that still continue to live in high northern latitudes, as on the shores of Iceland and Spitzbergen; and the abundance in which they were developed on the submerged plains and hill-sides of what are now England and Scotland, during what is termed the Pleistocene period, shows of itself what a very protracted period that was. The prevailing tellina of the bed which I last explored,—a bed which occurs in some places six miles inland, in others elevated on the top of dizzy crags,—is a sub-arctic shell (Tellina proxima), of which only dead valves are now to be detected on our coasts, but which may be found living at the North Cape and in Greenland. The prevailing astarte, its contemporary, was Astarte arctica, now so rare as a British species, that many of our most sedulous collectors have never seen a native specimen, but which is comparatively common on the northern shores of Iceland, and on the eastern coasts of Norway, within the arctic circle. In this elevated Scottish bed of the Pleistocene period I laid these boreal shells open to the light by hundreds, on the spot evidently where the individuals had lived and died. Under the severe climatal conditions to which (probably from some change in the direction of the gulf stream) what is now Northern Europe had been brought, this tellina and astarte had increased and multiplied until they became prevailing shells of the British area; and this increase must have been the slow work of ages, during which the plains, and not a few of the table lands, of the country, were submerged in a sub-arctic sea, and Great Britain existed as but a scattered archipelago of wintry islands. But in a still earlier period, of which there exists unequivocal evidence in the buried forests of Happisburgh and Cromer, the country had not only its head above water, as now, but seems to have possessed oven more than its present breadth of surface. During this ancient time,—more remote by many centuries than not only the times of the old coast-line, but than even those of the partial submergence of the island,—that northern mammoth lived in great abundance, of which the remains have been found by hundreds in England alone, together with the northern hippopotamus, and at least two northern species of rhinoceros. And though they have all ceased to exist, with their wild associates in the forests and jungles of the Pleistocene, the cave-hyaena, the cave-tiger, and the cave-bear, we know that the descendants of some of their feebler contemporaries, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, and the red deer, still live amid our hills and brakes. The trees, too, under which they roamed, and whose remains we find buried in the same deposits as theirs, were of species that still hold their place as aboriginal trees of the country, or of at least the more northerly provinces of the continent. The common Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of conifer of the far north, the Norwegian spruce (Abies excelsa), have been found underlying the Pleistocene drift, and rooted in the mammiferous crag; and for many ages must the old extinct elephant have roamed amid these familiar trees. From one limited tract of sea bottom on the Norfolk coast the fishermen engaged in dredging oysters brought ashore, in the course of thirteen years (from 1820 to 1833), no fewer than two thousand elephants' grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not have belonged to fewer than five hundred individual mammoths of English growth; and, various in their states of keeping, and belonging to animals of which only a few at a time could have found sufficient food in a limited tract of country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have belonged, not to one or two, but to many succeeding generations. The further fact, that remains of this ancient elephant (Elephas primigenius) occur all round the globe in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the seventieth degree of north latitude, leads to the same conclusion. It must have required many ages ere an animal that breeds so slowly as the elephant could have extended itself over an area so vast.



Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, especially of its molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I have said, to live in their descendants. Of even a still more ancient period, represented by the Red Crag, seventy out of every hundred species of shells still exist; and of an older period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, we find the first known ancestors of our common edible periwinkle and common edible mussel; and in the Coraline Crag, the first known ancestors of the common horse-mussel, the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great pecten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of Britain, which, however, in other parts of Europe we find so filled up as to render it evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the times represented by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and that no chasm or hiatus—no age of general chaos, darkness, and death—has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that immediately before the appearance of man upon earth, there existed a chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation. Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, there was no such chaotic period, in at least what is now Britain and the European continent: the persistency from a high antiquity of some of the existing races, of not only plants and shells, but of even some of the mammiferous animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat, prove there was not; and any scheme of reconciliation which takes such a period for granted must be deemed as unsuited to the present state of geologic knowledge, as any scheme would have been forty years ago which took it for granted that the writings of Moses do "fix the antiquity of the globe."

The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr. Pye Smith, though, save in one particular, identical, as I have said, with that of Dr. Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its single point of difference, to steer clear of the difficulty. Both schemes exhibit the creation recorded in Genesis as an event which took place about six thousand years ago; both describe it as begun and completed in six natural days; and both represent it as cut off from a previously existing creation by a chaotic period of death and darkness. But while, according to the scheme of Chalmers, both the Biblical creation and the previous period of death are represented as coextensive with the globe, they are represented, according to that of Dr. Smith, as limited and local. They may have extended, it is said, over only a few provinces of Central Asia, in which, when all was life and light in other parts of the globe, there reigned for a time only death and darkness amid the welterings of a chaotic sea; which, at the Divine command, was penetrated by light, and occupied by dry land, and ultimately, ere the end of the creative week, became a centre in which certain plants and animals, and finally man himself, were created. And this scheme, by leaving to the geologist in this country and elsewhere, save mayhap in some unknown Asiatic district, his unbroken series, certainly does not conflict with the facts educed by geologic discovery. It virtually removes Scripture altogether out of the field. I must confess, however, that on this, and on some other accounts, it has failed to satisfy me. I have stumbled, too, at the conception of a merely local and limited chaos, in which the darkness would be so complete, that when first penetrated by the light, that penetration could be described as actually a making or creating of light; and that, while life obtained all around its precincts, could yet be thoroughly void of life, A local darkness so profound as to admit no ray of light seems to have fallen for a time on Egypt, as one of the ten plagues; but the event was evidently miraculous; and no student of natural science is entitled to have recourse, in order to extricate himself out of a difficulty, to supposititious, unrecorded miracle. Creation cannot take place without miracle; but it would be a strange reversal of all our previous conclusions on the subject, should we have to hold that the dead, dark, blank out of which creation arose was miraculous also. And if, rejecting miracle, we cast ourselves on the purely natural, we find that the local darknesses dependent on known causes, of which we have any record in history, were always either very imperfect, like the darkness of your London fogs, or very temporary, like the darkness described by Pliny as occasioned by a cloud of volcanic ashes; and so, altogether inadequate to meet the demands of a hypothesis such as that of Dr. Smith. And yet further, I am disposed, I must add, to look for a broader and more general meaning in that grand description of the creation of all things with which the Divine record so appropriately opens, than I could recognize it as forming, were I assured it referred to but one of many existing creations,—a creation restricted to mayhap a few hundred square miles of country, and to mayhap a few scores of animals and plants. What, then, is the scheme of reconciliation which I would venture to propound?

Let me first remark, in reply, that I come before you this evening, not as a philologist, but simply as a student of geological fact, who, believing his Bible, believes also, that though theologians have at various times striven hard to pledge it to false science, geographical, astronomical, and geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author to no falsehood whatever. I occupy exactly the position now, with respect to geology, that the mere Christian geographer would have occupied with respect to geography in the days of those doctors of Salamanca who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Columbus that the world is round,—not flat; or exactly the position which the mere Christian astronomer would have occupied with respect to astronomy in the days of that Francis Turrettine who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Newton and Galileo, that it is the earth which moves in the heavens, and the sun which stands still. The mere geographer or astronomer might have been wholly unable to discuss with Turrettine or the doctors the niceties of Chaldaic punctuation, or the various meanings of the Hebrew verbs. But this much, notwithstanding, he would be perfectly qualified to say:—However great your skill as linguists, your reading of what you term the scriptural geography or scriptural astronomy must of necessity be a false reading, seeing that it commits Scripture to what, in my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know to be a monstrously false geography or astronomy. Premising, then, that I make no pretensions to even the slightest skill in philology, I remark further, that it has been held by accomplished philologists, that the days of the Mosaic creation may be regarded, without doing violence to the genius of the Hebrew language, as successive periods of great extent. And certainly, in looking at my English Bible, I find that the portion of time spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as six days, is spoken of in the second chapter as one day. True, there are other philologers, such as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a different view; but then I find this same Professor Stuart striving hard to make the phraseology of Moses "fix the antiquity of the globe;" and so, as a mere geologist, I reject his philology, on exactly the same principle on which the mere geographer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the mere astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, in any such case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by determining that that philology cannot be sound which would commit the Scriptures to a science that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier, Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the six days of the Mosaic narrative in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by the day referred to in the second,—not natural days, but lengthened periods,—I find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three of the six. Of the period during which light was created,—of the period during which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters,—or of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth's surface,—we need expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies,—sun, moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which we find in the passage,—what seemed to be, not what was; and as it was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest, on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what appeared at the time to be made that has been described as made? The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until this fourth period of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface.

The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to account for,—the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains of these three great periods, and of these only. And the question once fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into three great parts. There are many lesser divisions,—divisions into systems, formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three,—the Palaeozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the Secondary, or middle fossiliferous division; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division.

In the first, or Palaeozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans, molluscs, fishes, and, in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none of these classes of organisms give its leading character to the Palaeozoic; they do not constitute its prominent feature, or render it more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which followed. That which chiefly distinguished the Palaeozoic from the Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was emphatically the period of plants,—"of herbs yielding seed after their kind." In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,—a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up the winter fire,—in the brilliant gas that now casts its light on this great assemblage, and that lightens up the streets and lanes of this vast city,—in the glowing furnaces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our ponderous engines,—in the long dusky trains that, with shriek and snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes,—and in the great cloud-enveloped vessels that darken the lower reaches of your noble river, and rush in foam over ocean and sea. The geologic evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees, "yielding seed after their kind."

The middle great period of the geologist—that of the Secondary division—possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two exceptional instances its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age,—the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later, were its huge creeping things,—its enormous monsters of the deep,—and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful whales, not, however, as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class,—ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs,—must have tempested the deep; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and iguanodon,—creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,—must have crowded the plains or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the footprints of at least one of its many birds are fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on to deal was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find rendered, in the margin, great sea monsters.

The Tertiary period had also its prominent class of existences. Its flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present time; its reptiles occupy a very subordinate place; but its beasts of the field were by far the most wonderfully developed, both in size and numbers, that ever appeared upon earth. Its mammoths and its mastodons, its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous dinotherium and colossal megatherium, greatly more than equalled in bulk the largest mammals of the present time, and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one of its elephants (Elephas primigenius) are still so abundant amid the frozen wastes of Siberia, that what have been not inappropriately termed "ivory quarries" have been wrought among their bones for more than a hundred years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have already shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so abundant are the skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely a local museum in the kingdom that has not its specimens, dug out of the Pleistocene deposits of the neighborhood. And with this ancient elephant there were meetly associated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding magnitude. "Grand indeed," says an English naturalist, "was the fauna of the British islands in those early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants of nearly twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their way through the primeval forest; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted by hippopotami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those of Africa." The massive cave-bear and large cave-hyaena belonged to the same formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen (Bos longifrons and Bos primigenius), with a horse of smaller size, and an elk (Megaceros Hibernicus) that stood ten feet four inches in height. Truly this Tertiary age—this third and last of the great geologic periods—was peculiarly the age of great "beasts of the earth after their kind, and of cattle after their kind."

Permit me at this stage, in addressing myself to a London audience, to refer to what has been well termed one of the great sights of London. An illustration drawn from what must be familiar to you all may impart to your conceptions, respecting the facts on which I build, a degree of tangibility which otherwise they could not possess.



One of perhaps the most deeply interesting departments of your great British Museum—the wonder of the world—is that noble gallery, consisting of a suite of rooms, opening in line, the one beyond the other, which forms its rich storehouse of organic remains. You must of coarse remember the order in which the organisms of that gallery are ranged. The visitor is first ushered into a spacious room devoted to fossil plants, chiefly of the Coal Measures. And if these organisms are in any degree less imposing in their aspect than those of the apartments which follow in the series, it is only because that, from the exceeding greatness of the Coal Measure plants, they can be exhibited in but bits and fragments. Within less than an hour's walk of the Scottish capital there are single trees of this ancient period deeply embedded in the sandstone strata, which, though existing as mere mutilated portions of their former selves, would yet fail to find accommodation in that great apartment. One of those fossil trees,—a noble araucarian,—which occurs in what is known as the Granton quarry, is a mere fragment, for it wants both root and top, and yet what remains is sixty-one feet in length by six feet in diameter; and beside it there lies a smaller araucarian, also mutilated, for it wants top and branches, and it measures seventy feet in length by four feet in diameter. I saw lately, in a quarry of the Coal Measures about two miles from my dwelling-house, near Edinburgh, the stem of a plant (Lepidodendron Sternbergii), allied to the dwarfish club mosses of our moors, considerably thicker than the body of a man, and which, reckoning on the ordinary proportions of the plant, must have been at least seventy feet in height. And of a kind of aquatic reed (calamites), that more resembles the diminutive mare's tail of our marshes than aught else that now lives, remains have been found in abundance in the same coal field, more than a foot in diameter by thirty feet in length. Imposing, then, as are the vegetable remains of this portion of the National Museum, they would be greatly more imposing still did they more adequately represent the gigantic flora of the remote age to which they belong.



Passing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of the Palaeozoic division to the animals of the Secondary one, the attention is at once arrested by the monstrous forms on the wall. Shapes that more than rival in strangeness the great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of mediaeval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the passing visitor; and, though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with tails somewhat resembling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, had careered through the air on leathern wings like those of a bat; there an enormous crocodilian whale, that, mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed, in quest of prey, the green depths of the sea; yonder a herbivorous lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting from its snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank meadows of the Wealden, must have stood about twelve feet high. All is enormous, monstrous, vast, amid the creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of this division of the gallery.