THE SCENERY OF THE COAL PERIOD. 151 



chambers of the future ideas reserved in the all-produc 

 ing mind of Omniscience. Food for them there was none. 

 The atmosphere was a noxious poison, charged with all the 

 carbon which now exists in the form of modern vegetation 

 and beds of mineral coal. Denizens of the sea had for 

 ages strewn its bottom with the ruins of their workman 

 ship mountains of coral masonry had been reared by the 

 little polyp architect, but in all the murky air which floated 

 over the land and sea was not one motion of an animated 

 being not a voice no song of bird, or hum of insect s 

 wing to break the dread, eternal silence. The surges broke 

 upon the beach, the tempest gathered in the thickening air, 

 but no beast hurried to the sheltering cave ; the storm 

 burst upon the bald and desolate cliff, but no fluttering 

 wing sought protection from its fury. 



The period had now arrived, however, when this verdure- 

 less and voiceless scene was to be clothed and animated. 

 Now was perhaps the most important epoch in the whole 

 physical history of our planet. The forces of nature were 

 now to be called to their grandest exercise. The laws of 

 chemistry were summoned to an operation miraculously 

 beneficent and providential. Organic force now girded 

 itself for the production of new and higher forms of ani- 

 malization, and for the display of the earliest and richest 

 exuberance of the vegetable kingdom. 



The series of animate existences began with the proto- 

 zoon, and had ben carried through long progressive stages 

 to the highest types which make their home in the water 

 and respire that element. Man, the far-off consummation 

 of all these improvements, was to be a vastly superior 

 being ; but the next step in the direction of this consum 

 mation must be the introduction of an air-breathing ani 

 mal. In the existing condition of the world no air-breath 

 ing animal could survive, and Nature was called upon to 



