8 RELICS FROM THE WRECK 



ferns and graceful palms threw their shadows upon its sur- 

 face, and herbivorous and carnivorous quadrupeds roamed 

 in its forests ; when animate objects of uncouth shape 

 swarmed in its rivers, and sported on its plains ; all, how- 

 ever, swept away antecedent to the human creation, and 

 whose skeletons, after being washed in the ocean, were 

 laid up in the solid masonry of the globe's present super- 

 structure. The current of popular opinion has run vio- 

 lently against statements of this kind ; for no sentiment 

 has stronger hold of the common mind, than that all the 

 alarming phenomena of nature, with the existence of 

 death in the animal kingdom, are the penal consequences 

 of human transgression. Poetry has helped to extend 

 and perpetuate this idea, which observation contradicts, and 

 which a rational exegesis of the Scripture testimony has 

 shown to be unsupported by the record from which it was 

 primarily derived. 



' Thus began 



Outrage from lifeless things ; but Discord first. 

 Daughter of Sin, among the irrational, 

 Death introduced, through fierce antipathy ; 

 Beast now with beast 'gan war, and fowl with fowl, 

 And fish with fish ; to graze the herb all leaving, 

 Devour'd each other ; nor stood much in awe 

 Of man, but fled him ; or with countenance grim 

 Glared on him passing.' 



"The opening verse of the Scriptures announces the fact 

 of a dependant universe being created by the Almighty, but 

 assigns no date to the mighty operation. Geology de- 

 mands nothing beyond what this indefinite enunciation of 

 the Creator's work as to time supplies ; and theology, in the 

 passage, requires only an acknowledgment of the will, power, 

 and wisdom of the one God, in originating and super- 

 intending the terrestrial constitution. At a precise point 

 of time, the earth, in its primordial elements, as we are left 



