THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 85 



and without end, and they named it Zervane z\kerene, 

 and other names, in their spoken languages, to denote 

 an attribute of deit}^ By imagination we might' be- 

 hold a planet in evolution, as a moving picture from a 

 film upon which scenes have been recorded. The 

 science of geology reads the records of past ages from 

 rock-films, as they were written and preserved. From 

 remote points of the universe, the rays of reflected 

 light from our planet are now beheld by the omniscient 

 e>'e, as though the scenes they reveal were now be- 

 ing enacted upon the earth — a veritable picture of the 

 past ages, showing past scenes in panorama, as the 

 same rays of reflected light revealed them to the finite 

 eye, at close range, in the long ago. So we are enabled 

 to reconstruct some of them, imperfectly, by imagina- 

 tion, from what investigation has revealed in the ex- 

 posed strata of earth-film. 



In like manner, we may conceive that all the exper- 

 iences of finite senses may be revealed to the omnipo- 

 tent senses of infinite personality, as the sounds, per- 

 fumes, flavors and sensations of the prehistoric forests 

 radiated from the earth to traverse the boundless 

 spaces around us. The pigeon tribes were in America, 

 we have been told by the great geologists, at a remote 

 period, when the forests were young, after the car- 

 boniferous period, when the great araucarian pine for- 

 ests spread out over this continent. The araucarians 

 are extinct now, except a few in South America, and 

 only two varieties of the sequoias remain in North 

 America, restricted to California. They were the first 



