400 THE FOSSILIFEROUS 
habitancy, when he was yet too unskilful to commence its his- 
tory. 
Such is a view, all too inadequate, and yet, I fear, not a little 
tedious, both of the several fields in which our geologic mem- 
bers have still much labor before them, and of what a Scottish 
museum, truly national, should represent. Though the breaks 
and hiatuses are many, there are still noble materials within 
the limits of our country for the composition of its pre-Adamic 
history, —that history of which the record is in the rocks, and 
of which organisms are the significant and impressive charac- 
ters. The very gaps which occur in the long chronicle serve 
all the more strongly to divide it into periods, each furnished 
with its own independent group of being, specifically unlike 
that which went before, or that which followed after, and suited 
to remind us all the more emphatically in consequence, that to 
every species that ever lived in the old geologic ages there 
came a “last day.” We have been long accustomed to recog- 
nize the inexorable reign of death in its relation to individuals, 
and to regard it as one of the most assured and certain of all 
things, that as all who have lived upon our earth during the 
ages of the past have died, so it is “appointed for all” who 
now live upon it “once to die.” The same experience which 
leads us to anticipate that the sun will rise and set to-morrow, 
just because the sun has risen and set during all the many days 
of the past, leads us also to anticipate that all the individual 
creatures which now inhabit the earth will die, just because all 
the individual creatures which inhabited the earth in the bygone 
ages have died. And now we find geology extending this uni- 
form experience of death from individuals to species, and com- 
pelling us to believe, on the strength of the argument to which 
we so unhesitatingly yield in the other cases, that as all the 
species of the past have died, so it is destined for all the species 
of the present also to die. The theologian had to contend in 
