18G5.] BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 333 



spring, with which so many of our thoughts are co-ordinated, and 

 to which all but our thoughts and hopes will again return. 



How should we prize this history ! and exult in the thought 

 that in our own days, within our own memories, the very founda- 

 tions of the series of strata, deposited in the beginning of time, 

 bave been explored by our living friends, our Murchison and 

 Sedgwick, while the higher and more complicated parts of the 

 structure have been minutely examined by our Lyell, Forbes, and 

 Prestwich (d). How instructive the history of that long series 

 of inhabitants which received in primeval times the gift of life, 

 and filled the land, sea, and air with rejoicing myriads, through 

 innumerable revolutions of the planet, before, in the fulness of 

 time, it pleased the Giver of all good to place man upon the earth, 

 and bid him look up to heaven. 



Wave succeeding wave, the forms of ancient life sweep across 

 the ever-changing surface of the earth, revealing to us the height 

 of the land, the depth of the sea, the quality of the air, the 

 course of the rivers, the extent of the forest, the system of life 

 and death — yes, the growth, decay, and death of individuals, the 

 beginning and ending of races, of many successive races of plants 

 and animals, in seas now dried, on sand-banks now raised into 

 mountains, on continents now sunk beneath the waters. 



Had that series a beginning ? Was the earth ever uninhabited, 

 after it became a globe turning on its axis and revolving round 

 the sun? Was there ever a period since land and sea were 

 separated — a period which we can trace — when tlie land was not 

 shaded by plants, the ocean not alive with animals ? The answer, 

 as it comes to us from the latest observation, declares that in the 

 lowest deposits of the most ancient seas in the stratified crust of 

 the globe, the monuments of life remain. They extend to the 

 earliest sediments of water, now in part so changed as to appear 

 like the products of fire. What life ? Only the simpler and less 

 specially organised fabrics have as yet rewarded research among 

 these old Laurentian rocks — only the aggregated structures of 

 Foraminifera have been found in what, for the present, at least, 

 must be accepted as the first deposits of the oldest sea. The most 

 ancient of all known fossils, the Eozoon Canadense of Sir W. 



(d) The investigations of Murchison and Sedgwick in the Cambrian 

 and Silurian Strata began in 1831 ; the views of Sir C. Lyell on Ter- 

 tiary Periods were made known in 1829. 



