Many of the fishes of that remote period were, in general outline, similar to fishes now existing, but they exhibited striking peculiarities in their internal organization. As yet there were no land animals-perhaps no dry land. The strata must have been first horizontal-and ultimately the granitic points must have been protruded above the level of the sea, forming our mountains-and that, most probably, by the action of volcanic fire.

"It may be called the Era of the Oldest Mountains, or, more boldly, of the formation of the detached portions of dry land over the hitherto watery surface of the globe-an important part of the designs of Providence, for which the time was now apparently come. It may be remarked, that volcanic disturbances and protrusions of trap took place throughout the whole period of the deposition. of the primary rocks; but they were upon a comparatively limited scale, and probably all took place under water. It was only now that the central granitic masses of the great mountain ranges were thrown up, carrying up with them broken edges of the primary strata; a process which seems to have had this difference from the other, that it was the effect of a more tremendous force exerted at a lower depth in the earth, and generally acting in lines pervading a considerable portion of the earth's surface." 74.

Land formed. This brings us to another great era in the history of our globe. Land was laid bare-rains came down, and formed into springs, rivers, and lakes. The secondary, or stratified rocks, consisting of a great and varied series, rést generally against the flanks of the upturned primary rocks-sometimes considerably inclined-at others, forming basinlike beds, nearly horizontal--in many places broken up and shifted by disturbances from below. There was now a theatre for the existence of land-plants and animals. In the lowest group of secondary rocks was the carboniferous or coal strata, of vegetable formation, and presenting numerous species and kinds of plants, many of which are now without descendants. The animal remains of this era are not numerous, in comparison with those which go before or succeed. Some of the fishes are of

the sauroid character, partaking of the lizard nature, a genus of the Reptilia or land-class. Here, therefore, we have an approach to the airbreathing animals.

"Coal strata are nearly confined to the group termed the carboniferous formation. Thin beds are not unknown afterwards, but they occur only as a rare exception. It is therefore thought that the most important of the conditions which allowed of so abundant a terrestrial vegetation, had ceased about the time when this formation was closed. The high temperature was not one of the conditions which terminated, for there are evidences of it afterwards; but probably the superabundance of carbonic acid gas supposed to have existed during this era was expended before its close. There can be little doubt that the infusion of a large dose of this gas into the atmosphere at the present day would be attended by precisely the same circumstances as in the time of the carboniferous formation. Land animal life would not have a place on earth; vegetation would be enormous; and coal strata would be formed from the vast accumulations of woody matter, which would gather in every sea, near the mouths of great rivers." 91.

The termination of the carboniferous formation is marked by symptoms of volcanic violence-which some geologists have considered as the close of one system of things, and the beginning of another. Coal-beds gene

rally lie in basins-but all such basins are broken up into pieces, some of which are tossed up on edge-others sunk, while numerous eruptions of volcanic rock (trap) are seen.

Terrestrial Zoology.-The new red sandstone presents the commencement of land animals, and is subdivided into several groups.

"The second group is a limestone with an infusion of magnesia. It is developed less generally than some others, but occurs conspicuously in England and Germany. Its place, above the red sandstone, shows the recurrence of circumstances favourable to animal life, and we accordingly find in it not only zoophytes, conchifera, and a few tribes of fish, but some faint traces of land plants, and a new and startling appearance-a reptile of saurian (lizard) character, analogous to the now existing family called monitors. Remains of this creature are found in cupriferous (copper-bearing) slate connected with the mountain limestone, at Mansfield and Glucksbrunn, in Germany, which may be taken as evidence that dry land existed in that age near those places." 95.

Various fishes of that era disappear entirely. The third group, chiefly sandstones, show great agitation, and consequent diminution of animal life; but present, for the first time, specimens of vertebrate animals of the sub-kingdom, namely, reptiles with imperfect respiratory apparatus. The specimens found are allied to the crocodile and lizard tribes of the present day-but stupendous in size.

The animal to which the name ichthyosaurus has been given, was as long as a young whale, and it was fitted for living in the water, though breathing the atmosphere. It had the vertebral column and general bodily form of a fish, but to that were added the head and breast-bone of a lizard, and the paddles of the whale tribes. The beak, moreover, was that of a porpoise, and the teeth were those of a crocodile. It must have been a most destructive creature to the fish of those early seas." 97.

The pterodactyle was a lizard, furnished with wings to pursue its prey in the air. Crocodiles were 100 feet in length ! Marks of the feet of animals are discovered in the slabs of the new red sandstone. Some of these prints indicate small animals; but others denote birds of unusually large size.

Oolite-Mammalia.-The oolite is a limestone composed of small round grains, like eggs, or rather the roe of a fish. It is largely developed in England, France, and other countries, and is supposed to be of chemical formation. Organic remains are very numerous in the oolite system. The animals of the oolite are entirely different in species from those of the preceding age. The dry land of this period presented cycadeæ, a beautiful class of plants between the palms and conifers. The ocean at this time swelled with inhabitants. The polypiaria were so abundant as to form strata of themselves. Here was the BELEMNITE, with conical shell, air-chambers, and an ink-bag, with which it could muddle the water around it when pursued! Land reptiles now abounded, and here, for the first time, we find remains of insects-also some fragments of the marsupial family, now the kangaroo.

Cretaceous Formation.-This, being a marine deposit, shows that the

sea once flowed over the Cliffs of Dover, but the organic remains found in the chalk-beds, prove that dry land must have existed in the neighbourhood.

Tertiary Formation—Mammalia.-The chalk-beds are the highest strata that extend over a considerable space; but in hollows of these beds there have been formed series of strata-clays, limestones, marls, &c. to which the name of tertiary formation has been given.

"The hollows filled by the tertiary formation must be considered as the beds of estuaries left at the conclusion of the cretaceous period. We have seen that an estuary, either by the drifting up of its mouth, or a change of level in that quarter, may be supposed to have become an inland sheet of water, and that, by another change, of the reverse kind, it may be supposed to have become an estuary again. Such changes the Paris basin appears to have undergone oftener than once, for, first, we have there a fresh-water formation of clay and limestone beds; then a marine-limestone formation; next, a second fresh-water formation, in which the material of the celebrated plaster of Paris (gypsum) is included; then, a second marine formation of sandy and limy beds; and finally, a third series of fresh-water strata. Such alternations occur in other examples of the tertiary formation likewise." 126.

Shells innumerable have been found in these tertiary deposits; but they sink into insignificance when compared with the mammalian remains discovered in the Parisian beds, and which prove that the land had now become the theatre of an extensive creation of the highest class of animals. Cuvier ascertained fifty species of these-all of them long since extinct. One was about the size of a horse, with lower jaw shorter than the upper -the feet presenting three large toes unprovided with claws. animals were herbivorous. One of them was 18 feet in length-had a mole-like form, capable of digging in the earth, and, as Dr. Buckland thinks, adapted both for land and water. In a subsequent period of the tertiary formation, the above animals disappear, and we have the elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, &c. some of them startling from their size, as the mastodon twelve feet in height! The pliocene period of the tertiary deposits gives us the ox, the deer, camels, and other species of the ruminantia. Evidences of great volcanic disturbances are distinguishable in the tertiary deposits.

Superficial Formations.-Between the tertiary period, above alluded to, and the formation of man, there appears to have been an era of stiff blue clay, mingled with fragments of rock, of all sizes, travel-worn, to which geologists have given the name of diluvium, as being apparently the produce of some vast flood, or of the sea thrown into an unusual agitation. It seems then, when this stratum was laid down, much of the present dry land was under the ocean.

"The included masses of rock have been carefully inspected in many places, and traced to particular parent beds at considerable distances. Connected with these phenomena are certain rock surfaces on the slopes of hills and elsewhere, which exhibit groovings and scratchings, such as we might suppose would be produced by a quantity of loose blocks hurried along over them by a flood." 135. This diluvium and these erratic blocks clearly indicate one last and long

submersion of this globe's surface under the ocean. But at length the land rose, or the sea subsided, as evidenced by the terraces which were successively the shores of the sea, and which are still seen, one above the other, on various coasts. They rise from twenty to twelve hundred feet above the level of the ocean.

The irresistible inference from the phenomena is, that the highest was first the coast line; then an elevation took place, and the second highest became so, the first being now raised into the air and thrown inland. Then, upon another elevation, the sea began to form, at its new point of contact with the land, the third, highest beach, and so on down to the platform nearest to the present seabeach." 141.

This general submersion must, in all probability, have destroyed all terrestrial animal life; for no animals of anterior periods could be detected subsequently. The whole was changed-and a new creation took place when land re-appeared!

"Thus concludes the wondrous chapter of the earth's history which is told by geology. It takes up our globe at the period when its original incandescent state had nearly ceased; conducts it through what we have every reason to believe were vast, or at least very considerable, spaces of time, in the course of which many superficial changes took place, and vegetable and animal life was gradually developed; and drops it just at the point when man was apparently about to enter on the scene." 145.

Here our ingenious author enters into a long discussion as to whether the various tribes of animals were created and recreated by the direct personal power of the Almighty, or by the agency of laws which he laid down from the beginning. We do not see much interest in this dissertation; for either supposition infers the existence, the power, and the wisdom of the Creator.

"Those who would object to the hypothesis of a creation by the intervention of law, do not perhaps consider how powerful an argument in favour of the existence of God is lost by rejecting this doctrine. When all is seen to be the result of law, the idea of an Almighty Author becomes irresistible, for the creation of a law for an endless series of phenomena-an act of intelligence above all else that we can conceive-could have no other imaginable source, and tells, moreover, as powerfully for a sustaining as for an originating power." 158.

Man. We have seen that, as soon as the temperature of the once boiling sea had settled down to a certain point, the ocean became tenanted by various kinds of animals, as evinced by their remains being found embedded in the strata formed beneath the waters. And when the land projected above the level of the ocean, and became tenantable, life was instantly produced, and series after series of animated creatures spread themselves over its surface. For how many millions and millions of years this production and reproductions of animals went on before man made his appearance on the scene, no human being will ever know. In all probability, countless ages must have elapsed, before this master-piece of creation appeared. Our author's speculations on the how, the why, the

The Barham rocks near Harrogate present remarkable specimens of the above. Rev.

when and the wherefore this great event occurred, will not give satisfaction to the present race of mankind! His hypothesis is three or four centuries in advance of the TIMES, and will be stigmatized by the modern saints as downright Atheism, although the author every where expresses his reverence for the consummate wisdom and power, and benevolence of the Supreme Being.

Our author evidently leans to the doctrine of "equivocal generation," considering the giving life to insects out of flint by Mr. Cross, as much a law of the Almighty, as the creation of the elephant or the homo.

"On the hypothesis here brought forward, the acarus Crossii was a type of being ordained from the beginning, and destined to be realized under certain physical conditions. When a human hand brought these conditions into the proper arrangement, it did an act akin to hundreds of familiar ones which we execute every day, and which are followed by natural results; but it did nothing more. The production of the insect, if it did take place as assumed, was as clearly an act of the Almighty himself, as if he had fashioned it with hands." 189.

Our author seems convinced that, instead of new creations at various epochs of the revolutions of this globe, one race reproduced its successor, according to the original laws of the Deity, and not by immediate interposition of God himself. This is the portion of his doctrine which will have to stand a hard test by the saints of the day!

"We have yet to advert to the most interesting class of facts connected with the laws of organic development. It is only in recent times that physiologists have observed that each animal passes, in the course of its germinal history, through a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the various orders of animals inferior to it in the scale. Thus, for instance, an insect standing at the head of the articulated animals, is, in the larva state, a true annelid, or worm, the annelida being the lowest in the same class. The embryo of a crab resembles the perfect animal of the inferior order myriapoda, and passes through all the forms of transition which characterize the intermediate tribes of crustacea. The frog, for some time after its birth, is a fish with external gills, and other organs fitting it for an aquatic life, all of which are changed as it advances to maturity, and becomes a land animal. The mammifer only passes through still more stages according to its higher place in the scale. Nor is man himself exempt from this law. His first form is that which is permanent in the animalcule. His organization gradually passes through conditions generally resembling a fish, a reptile, a bird, and the lower mammalia, before it attains its specific maturity. At one of the last stages of his foetal career, he exhibits an intermaxillary bone, which is characteristic of the perfect ape: this is suppressed, and he may then be said to take leave of the simial type, and become a true human creature. Even, as we shall see, the varieties of his race are represented in the progressive development of an individual of the highest, before we see the adult Caucasian, the highest point yet attained in the animal scale." 199.

To come to particulars. The brain of man exceeds that of all other animals in complexity of organization and fulness of development. Yet, at one early period, it is only "a simple fold of nervous matter," with difficulty distinguishable into three parts. In this state it perfectly re. sembles the brain of an adult fish-thus assuming, in transitu, the form that, in the fish, is permanent.

"In a short time, however, the structure is become more complex, the parts more distinct, the spinal marrow better marked; it is now the brain of a reptile.