OF A FORMER WORLD. 17 



encroaching influence of the waves, we would not be 

 credited by many the assertion would seem that of one 

 whose avocation was the excitement of astonishment, and 

 who if he could make his reader wonder, had attained the 

 acme of his ambition. Yet such, nevertheless, is the con- 

 clusion, to which all who study the structure of the earth, 

 divested of prejudice and preconception, are necessarily led/' 



If we look with wonder upon the great remains of human 

 works, says Sir H. Davy, such as the columns of Pal- 

 myra, broken in the midst of the desert ; the temples of 

 PaBstum, beautiful in the decay of twenty centuries; or' 

 the mutilated fragments of Greek sculpture in the Acro- 

 polis of Athens, or in our own museums, as proofs of the 

 genius of artists, and power and riches of nations now 

 passed away ; with how much deeper feeling of admiration 

 must we consider those grand monuments of nature which 

 mark the revolutions of the Globe ; continents broken into 

 islands ; one land produced, another destroyed ; the bottom 

 of the ocean become a fertile soil ; whole races of animals 

 extinct, and the bones and exuviae of one class covered with 

 the remains of another ; and upon the graves of past gen- 

 erations the marble or rocky tombs, as it were, of a for- 

 mer animated world new generations rising, and order 

 and harmony established, and a system of life and beauty 

 produced out of chaos and death ; proving the infinite power, 

 wisdom, and goodness of the GREAT CAUSE of all things! 



From the numerous foreign writers, who at a very early 

 period began to entertain correct notions of the structure 

 of our planet, and of the nature of the revolutions which 

 it had undergone, we are induced to select the following 

 highly philosophical and beautiful illustration of the phy- 

 sical mutations to which the surface of the earth is per- 

 petually exposed. It is from an Arabic manuscript written 

 in the thirteenth century. The narrative is supposed to be 

 given by Rhidhz, an allegorical personage. 



