174 FOOTNOTES FROM 



ages before the first parents of the human race were 

 called into existence. The wonderful records which they 

 have left behind them in our rocks carry us back to a 

 period when the world, now so beautiful with its verdant 

 meadows and waving woods, was one dreary pestiferous 

 bog, where calamites, sigill arias, and other gigantic marsh 

 plants formed intricate jungles, in whose damp recesses 

 horrid reptiles roared and wallowed, and made war upon 

 each other. In the waters of the primeval seas they 

 flourished in the greatest profusion, supplying the ulti- 

 mate food of the pleiosauri, ichthyosauri, and the other 

 huge reptiles with which they swarmed, just as their 

 successors form the basis of subsistence, through an 

 amazing series of links, for those mighty devourers, the 

 whales, the seals, and the walruses of the Arctic and 

 Antarctic oceans. The fiery cataclysms, which extirpated 

 whole races of plants and animals, left these atomies un- 

 injured ; the physical changes going on over the whole 

 earth only served to carry them uninjured from one 

 geological epoch to another, until at length we behold 

 in the diatoms of our pools, rivers, and seas, the represen- 

 tatives and exact counterparts of the races that lived 

 and died in those ages of the world, compared with 

 which the antiquity of recorded time is but as yesterday. 

 Step by step, up from the lowest fossiliferous strata, 

 when life was just feebly dawning, when the eye that 

 gazed upon the dreary lifeless scenes which the earth 

 then presented was more rudimentary than that of 

 the mollusc, and the ear that listened to the wild cease- 

 less moaning of waves, the splintering of rocks, and 

 the roar of volcanoes, was but a mere oolitic vesicle ; 



