462 OBSERVATIONS ON THE ANIMALS 
chiefly in the upper secondary strata of the Alps, Carpathians, and 
Pyrenees, and in the tertiary limestones of Verona and Monte Bol- 
ca. They are there numerous as the sands upon the sea-shore: and 
even if we imagine that their former possessors swarmed in the an- 
cient seas, and cleared away the redundancy of animal life by the 
free indulgence of their carnivorous propensities, still it requires no 
slight effort of the mind to look back through the long vista of de- 
parted ages, and consider the amount of time which must necessarily 
have been required for the gradual accretion of mountains of small 
shells, each of them once performing a part, doubtless very impor- 
tant, in an animal of high organization, created for a wise purpose, 
living its appointed time, and then dying, but leaving as a bequest 
to futurity its little skeleton, to form afterwards, when united with 
many others of its kind, a prominent and useful portion of the crust 
of the earth. No such honour awaits the remains of the elephant, 
the rhinoceros, or the whale, gigantic as are their forms; nor can 
even man expect that his remains, and the work of his hands, will 
thus mingle with nature’s works, and assist in forming the future 
surface of the globe. It is only the smallest and most unpretend- 
ing, the apparently most insignificant of animals, which, admitting 
of vastness in number rather than in size, and multiplying with a 
rapidity utterly baffling to all our powers of comprehension, thus 
produce gigantic effects from causes, to al] appearance, inadequate, 
and leave monuments that endure from generation to generation, 
till the gradual wearing of atmospheric agents, or the more rapid 
alteration effected by subterraneous fire, shall cause the particles 
once aggregated by the living principle to enter into new chemical 
combinations, and so alter and destroy the organic structure. 
Thus does the geologist look back into those chapters of the history 
of the globe written only in the hieroglyphic of nature, and telling of 
conditions long since changed ; and then forward to other and fu- 
ture periods, when the “time and chance” that happen to all shall 
have worked new effects from old causes, and given more evidence 
(if more were wanted) of the wisdom, the greatness, and the power, 
of that Being who framed the laws which govern matter, and the 
creatures created of it. 
If it excites our surprise, as it well may, that the organic remains 
of the Nummulite form a sensible proportion of the actual mass of 
which the earth is composed, although an individual specimen rare- 
ly posseses a diameter of more than half an inch,what shall we say 
on learning that there is another genus (Miliola), referred to D’Or- 
bigny’s fourth group of the Foraminifera, which, although it ne- 
