THESE fragments of rock on the table before us, chips

which the road-maker would consider sorry material for his purpose, and the feet of the ignorant might spurn from their path, are in the eye of Science invested with as high

an interest as the obelisks of Egypt, or the sculptures of Nineveh. The antiquarian pores with enthusiasm over the lines and letters of the one, and endeavours to decipher the unconnected history of a few thousand years; the geologist bends with equal delight over the forms and impressions on the other, and tries to gather therefrom some intelligible glimpses of a PAST, compared with whose duration the chronology of man is but as the moments of yesterday. The one as connected with the Humanity to which we belong-chequered and humiliating as it has been in many of its phases-must ever excite a lively and immediate interest; the other appertaining to the history of the globe we inherit, and of whose plan our race forms so important a feature, can never cease to attract the attention of enlightened intelligence. In his inciting research the archæologist exhumes buried cities and catacombs, collects the mutilated fragments of human art, deciphers monumental inscriptions, and notes every vestige of the various races that may have peopled any given locality; so in geology the earnest inquirer examines every accessible stratum, collects the fossil fragments he exhumes, and, comparing them with the plants and animals now peopling the earth, endeavours to arrive at a knowledge of the various races that have successively adorned its surface. As a stone-hatchet, a flint arrow-head, a tree canoe, or fragment of pottery, will often throw a flood of light on the researches of the historian; so in geology, the impression of a leaf, a petrified shell, a tooth, a fragment of bone, or a single fish-scale, will often suffice to unriddle the most puzzling problem. The one kind of evidence speaks of the hand that fabricated, the degree of intelligence that directed the fabrication, and the purpose it was meant to subserve; the other tells of the nature of the plant or animal to which it belonged, the climate and conditions under which it grew

and flourished, the place it held, and the function it performed in the world's economy, and, higher than all, the omniscience and skill that pre-ordained and directed with unerring precision its numerous and complicated co-adaptations.

Rough and mutilated as these fragments may appear— obscure as are the forms impressed on their surfaces, they embody a tale of the world's PAST as legible to the eye of Science and often far more connected-than these sculptures on this slab, or those hieroglyphics graven on that sarcophagus. These forked lobes, little more than a mere discoloration on the stone, once floated as sea-weed in the waters; that reed-like stem converted into stone, as it now is, luxuriated in some primeval marsh; that rock-impressed fern-frond once waved its feathery leaflets in the sunshine of a genial climate; and that tiny spikelet, now the merest film of carbonaceous matter, has sparkled with the nightdews of heaven as certainly as the dews now cherish the tender herb, or the sunlight gives colour to existing verdure. Worthless as these chips may seem, the eye of the zoologist detects in this the pore-work of a coral, in that the valves of a shell-fish; on this the scales of a fish, on that the plates of a reptile; in this the bone of a bird, in that the bone of a mammal; in this the grinder that milled the leafy twigs of the forest, in that the trenchant tooth that preyed on the flesh of other creatures. Every trace becomes a letter, every fragment a word, and every perfect fossil a chapter in the world's history, which tells of waters that were thronged and of lands that were tenanted by life of races that lived and multiplied and perishedof others that took their places-and this (as we shall afterwards see) so often repeated, over and over and over again, that the mind, at first excited by the marvels it unfolds, begins at last to grow weary of the review, and the finite

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creature loses itself in the contemplation of the works of the Infinite Creator.

The objects through which we arrive at a knowledge of this extinct life are what are familiarly termed "Fossils"the remains of plants and animals that were entombed in the silt and sediment of former lakes and estuaries and seas, and became petrified, or converted into stone, as these sediments solidified into rocky strata. As the autumnal leaf drops into the stream and becomes imbedded in its mud— as the trees of the forest are borne down by the flooded river and are ultimately entangled in the silt of its estuary -as the coral-reef and shell-bed are gradually increasing and growing, as it were, into limestone before our eyes-as the skeletons of animals are drifted by the tide and fall to the sea-bottom, or sink into rivers and marshes, and are thus preserved from further decay—so in all time past have similar agencies been at work: here preserving the broken twig and the fallen forest, there the coral-reef and the littoral shell-bed, and anon the remains of animals that were borne by rivers from the land, or drifted by the waves on the muddy sea-shore. These organisms so preserved and petrified constitute the "fossils" of the geologist, who, treating them apart from the rocks in which they are imbedded, has erected their study into a new science, under the title of PALEONTOLOGY, or the Study of Ancient Life. Originally differing in nature, being in various degrees of completeness at the time they were imbedded, and, above all, being preserved in different kinds of rock-matter, as shale, and coal, and limestone, and flint, and sandstone, they are now found in different degrees of perfection and distinctness. In some we find the original form and all the parts entire, of others we have a mere hollow cast or mould, of some a simple impression of the external surface, of others we have but scattered traces, and these so obscure