SKETCHES OF CREATION. W! CHAPTER I. DISCLOSURE OF THE SUBJECT. HAT is this which I have opened from the solid rock? It has the appearance of a bivalve shell, like a clam or an oyster. I was passing a delightful summerday amid the romantic scenery of Trenton Falls, and broke from the rocky wall of the deep-cut gorge these unexpected forms. Who has not stumbled upon similar shapes at the foot of some beetling cliff, or washed from the weathered soil of some cultivated field? Pause a moment, for these are remarkable and unexpected discoveries. Let us interrogate these forms. They can not be the shells of oysters or clams; for, in the first place, they are only stone in substance, with a peculiarly dead and mineralized appearance. In the next place, they are nearly three hundred miles from salt water, and as many feet above the level of the sea. Perhaps, then, they are the dead and petrified shells of some freshwater molluscs, like mussels. This can not be, because the resemblance is not sufficiently close. The beak, or most prominent part of these shell-like forms, is exactly in the middle (Fig. 1, a; see page 14), while the beak of the mussel is always nearer to one end (Fig. 3, a; see page 14). And, farther, one piece or valve of these problematic waifs has a different degree of convexity from the other (Fig. 2), while with mussels both valves are equally con a Fig. 1. Fossil bivalve from Fig. 2. Edge view of the vex (Fig. 4). In fact, the more we study these things, the less they look like mussel-shells-the less they look like any thing else with which we are acquainted. I have a heard men familiarly call these objects by the name of "clamshells;" and others they call "snails;" and still other curious struc Fig. 3. Common River Mussel. View of left tures, frequently valve. a. The "beak." en countered in cultivated fields, they designate as "petrified honey-comb" and "petrified wasps'-nests." But a few moments' careful observation suffices to show that these things differ materially from the objects whose names have been bestowed upon Fig. 4. View of "hinge line" of the same, show them. ing the equal convexity of the two valves. It seems unreasonable to suppose, therefore, that these shell-like forms have ever belonged to living animals. They are probably but "mere freaks of nature." Perhaps they have been produced by "the influences of the stars." Or, it may be, there is some mysterious "principle” in the earth which, by some sort of "fermentation," produces these semblances to living forms. Or, still again, as these rocks existed before animals were created, it may be that the Creator moulded these lifeless shapes to serve as "prototypes" or "models" from which the living forms of animals were to be copied. Or, who knows, finally, but the old conjecture of Epicurus may be truth? Since matter must exist in some form, may we not regard these as some of the possible forms under which the particles of matter fortuitously fall? So reasoned the world prior to the sixteenth century. But this was when the philosopher sat in his closet and argued how things ought to be, instead of going forth to observe how things are. We have learned to contemplate Nature with a different spirit. We have pulled down the house of many a speculatist about his ears. We have demolished many a universe constructed of the cobwebs of logic. We do not despise first principles and necessary deductions, but we have discovered a more direct and a more certain way of arriving at a history of the universe. We interrogate the facts which surround us, and have found them able to narrate a history which never entered the imaginations of the schoolmen. The phenomena of Nature are the premises of our reasoning instead of its conclusions. We have learned to look upon Nature with a profounder respect; and, though the alphabet of our philosophy be trees, and birds, and rocks, and fossils, and other material things which metaphysics affects to despise, we have found that they combine themselves into a language freighted with grand conceptions, and rich in utterances of the unseen, the high, and the holy. It has been revealed to us that the vast system of Nature is the expression of a divine thought-that the wide, blue, restless ocean is the symbol of a divine idea-the swelling prairie, the rocky cordillera, the teeming populations of land, and sea, and air, are the utterances of divine conceptions—the stirring leaf, the basking butterfly, the glistening pebble on the strand, are thoughts of the Infinite, crystallized in visible things, thrown down before us to arrest our attention-strewn over our pathway to provoke our curiosity and arouse the powers of the soul. We have listened to the recital of the pebble, and its simple story has turned our thoughts backward over the flight of ages, and disclosed a marvelous unity running through the long series of revolutions and innovations to which our domestic planet has been subjected. We have read the epic of the trilobite, and have learned of a Deity inaugurating plans in the infancy of our earth which are still in process of consummation. We have lighted the vistas of the fleeting ages. We have studied the records. of universal empires, and the monuments which perpetuate. the memory of powerful dynasties. We have seen the procession of living forms pass by, and discovered them marshaled by a single leading Intelligence. We have witnessed the progressive development of the physical world. -its successive adaptations to its successive populations, and its completion and special preparation for the occupancy of man, and have learned that the whole creation is the product of one eternal, intelligent master purpose— the coherent result of ONE MIND. What higher subject of contemplation than the worldphenomena which express the thoughts of the Creator? What nobler history to study than the annals of races and revolutions in which the Almighty purpose, instead of human will, has been the controlling power? What antiquities more awe-inspiring than the ruins of continents and the tombs of races whose splendid dynasties passed their meridian and decline while yet the family of Adam was in the unborn future, and God, in the awful solitudes of earth, worked out his all-embracing plans? From the elevated stand-point of modern science, the view before us is inspiring. Let us thread a few of the footpaths leading up to this enchanting altitude, |