be covered, two seasons hence, with flowers and fruit. That strangely formed organism presents no existing type among all the numerous families of the vegetable kingdom. There is an amazing luxuriance of growth all around us. Scarce can the current make way through the thickets of aquatic plants that rise thick from the muddy bottom; and though the sunshine falls bright on the upper boughs of the tangled forest beyond, not a ray penetrates the more than twilight gloom that broods over the marshy platform below. The rank steam of decaying vegetation forms a thick blue haze, that partially obscures the underwood; deadly lakes of carbonic acid gas have accumulated in the hollows; there is silence all around, uninterrupted save by the sudden splash of some reptile fish that has risen to the surface in pursuit of its prey, or when a sudden breeze stirs the hot air, and shakes the fronds of the giant ferns or the catkins of the reeds. The wide continent before us is a continent devoid of animal life, save that its pools and rivers abound in fish and mollusca, and that millions and tens of millions of the infusory tribes swarm in the bogs and marshes. Here and there, too, an insect of strange form flutters among the leaves. It is more than probable that no creature furnished with lungs of the more perfect construction could have breathed the atmosphere of this early period, and have lived. Doubts have been entertained whether the limestone of Burdie House belongs to the Upper Old Red Sandstone or to the inferior Coal Measures. And the fact may yet come to be quoted as a very direct proof of the ignorance which obtained regarding the fossils of the older formation, at a time when the organisms of most of the other formations, both above and below it, had been carefully explored. The Limestone of Burdie House is unequivocally and most characteristically a Coal Measure limestone. It abounds in vegetable remains of terrestrial or lacustrine growth, and these, too, the vegetables common to the Coal Measures—feins, reeds, and club-mosses. One can scarce detach a fragment from the mass, that has not its leaflet or seed-cone enclosed, and in a state of such perfect preservation, that there can be no possibility of mistaking its character. If in reality a marine deposit, it must have been formed in the immediate neighborhood of a land covered with vegetation. The dove set loose by Noah bore not back with it a less equivocal sign that the waters had abated. Now, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone none of these plants occur. The deposit is exclusively an ocean deposit, and the remains in Scotland, until we arrive at its inferior and middle formations, are exclusively animal remains. Its upper member, "the yellow sandstone," says Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, "does not exhibit a single particle of carbonaceous matter. -no trace or film of a branch having been detected in it, though, if such in reality existed, there are not wanting opportunities of obtaining specimens in some one of the twenty or thirty quarries which have been opened in the county of Fife in this deposit alone." No two bordering formations in the geological scale have their boundaries better defined by the character of their fossils than the Old Red Sandstone and the Coal Measures. We pursue our history no further. Its after course is comparatively well known. The huge sauroid fish was succeeded by the equally huge reptile-the reptile by the birdthe bird by the marsupial quadruped; and at length, after races higher in the scale of instinct had taken precedence in succession, the one of the other, the sagacious elephant appeared, as the lord of that latest creation which immediately preceded our own. How natural does the thought seem which suggested itself to the profound mind of Cuvier, when indulging in a similar review! Has the last scene in the series arisen, or has Deity expended his infinitude of resource, and reached the ultimate stage of progression at which perfection can arrive? The philosopher hesitated, and then decided in the negative, for he was too intimately acquainted with the works of the Omnipotent Creator to think of limiting his power; and he could, therefore, anticipate a coming period in which man would have to resign his post of honor to some nobler and wiser creature -the monarch of a better and happier world. How well it is, to be permitted to indulge in the expansion of Cuvier's thought, without sharing in the melancholy of Cuvier's feeling-to be enabled to look forward to the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, not in terror, but in hope to be encouraged to believe in the system of unending progression, but to entertain no fear of the degradation or deposition of man! The adorable Monarch of the future, with all its unsummed perfection, has already passed into the heavens, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone, and Enoch and Elias are there with him - fit representatives of that dominant race, which no other race shall ever supplant or succeed, and to whose onward and upward march the deep echoes of eternity shall never cease to respond. |