8 Notice of the Wonders of Geology. 
groups and ranges, and with the foundations of countries and con- 
tinents. ‘Trained in our earlier years among the granite hills and 
trap walls of New England, we have associated with them our 
youthful preference and almost filial veneration. 
There is a splendid and magnificent association between the 
active volcano, with its earthquakes, its thunder, its flames, its 
ignited ejections, and its rivers of molten rock,—and the deep 
granite foundations which now exhibit the dignity of repose be- 
neath the superstructure of subsequent formations, although the 
granite itself was once the victim of fire, and was either raised 
and injected like the veins and dikes, and lava walls of modern 
volcanoes, or like the deep lava masses, subsided into quiescence 
after an ineffectual struggle to throw off or break through an im- 
pending ocean, or to rend the incumbent strata of the crust of 
the earth, 
If, however, we are disposed to claim all due respect for our 
ancient friends, the traps and porphyries, the sienites and the 
granites, we are delighted with the immense developments of 
fossils in their successive eras, described and figured as they are 
with scientific precision and graphic beauty ; while they are re- 
ferred, by the aid of natural history, to those families of organi- 
zed beings which, in most instances, have still their analogues on 
earth, although there is perhaps not asingle species below the ter- 
tiary that is identical with any now existing. 
Our elementary works and occasional memoirs, are in this age, 
rich in figures and descriptions of organic remains. Italy, Ger- 
many, Switzerland, France, Britain, and even North America, 
vie with each other in a zealous and successful cultivation. of 
these branches of natural history. Like the mummies of Egypt, 
secluded for decades of centuries in their mysterious catacombs, 
the beings of early geological ages are now disentombed and 
brought to light, and we do not read with more certainty the an- 
cient condition of the human race in Egypt, when the Nile flow- 
ed by the then youthful temples of Thebes, and the solemn av- 
enues of silent and unmutilated Sphinxes, or that of the Romans, 
when Vesuvius, with its lava or ashes, and eruptive waters, buried 
Herculaneum, Stabia, and Pompeii, than we now study the in- 
habitants of the primitive seas; the venerable vegetables of the 
coal formation ; the almost unlimited secular range of the verte- 
brated fishes; the amphibious or terrestrial dominion of the fossil 
a 
