254 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



ties are divided on the question whether they do not really 

 belong to proboscidians. All these facts accord with the 

 theory of a g'enealogical descent from the older types, 

 through the mastodons and transitional mastodons to the 

 most divergent elephants. 



The Wardian restoration, therefore, carries our thoughts 

 backward directly to the epoch when Europe and America 

 became wrapped in a permanent mantle of snow ; and to a 

 later epoch, when it was the companion of the rude ancestors 

 of our species; and then, by association, backward into more 

 distant ages, when the plastic influence of time was slowly 

 evolving the elephantine type from the mastodon and from 

 still older and stranger forms. In these prehuman ages the 

 fair surface of our states and territories was populated 

 by herds of quadrupeds as strange as they were gigantic. 

 They grazed and browsed over regions which are now 

 the sites of waving crops and populous cities, and prob- 

 ably of navigable lakes. Here were nursed the primeval 

 horses, and rhinoceroses, and tapirs, and camels, and pigs, 

 and deer, and perhaps mastodons, whose descendants wan- 

 dered by the northwest passage to Asia, Europe, and 

 Africa. Here was the real Old World spread continent- 

 wide and populous, while Europe was merely an archi- 

 pelago. The relics of that wonderful extinct population 

 have been studied by Leidy, and Cope, and Marsh; and 

 through their labors we are permitted to live, as it were, 

 a million years ago. Still more real and present appear 

 the scenes of those primitive times when we stand in the 

 midst of the restored and rehabilitated creatures of the 

 Occident and the Orient which Professor Ward has spread 

 before the eyes of the curious and inquiring in his vast 

 museum at Rochester. 



