THE SUN COOLING OFF. 415 



eyeballs, and imagination spanned another interval of 

 ages ; and I stood upon the banks of the Tigris and the 

 Nile, and the forms of Sennacherib, and Menes, and Moses 

 passed before me. As chance would have it, I returned, 

 and, passing through a cabinet where the &quot; medals of crea 

 tion&quot; had been ranged in regular order, the ponderous mo 

 lars Of an extinct mammoth, dug from the soil of Michigan, 

 awakened a new thought. By its side rested the skull of 

 Oreodon, with its sheep-like teeth in a hog-like head ; and, 

 being in a mood for revery, I thought of the distant Mis 

 souri plains where Oreodon had grazed ; and of the vast 

 lake thrice the size of Superior from whose water he had 

 drank, and on whose niuddy banks had crawled turtles 

 that could carry oxen on their backs. And then I remem 

 bered that thought had darted back over another stretch 

 of ages to a time when God had not yet said, &quot;Let us make 

 man,&quot; when the wide continent was the pasture-ground of 

 elephants, and mastodons, and wild horses, and camels, and 

 sloths, and quadrupeds of strange shapes which were blot 

 ted out of existence before ever human eye had gazed upon 

 them. 



Here, I thought, are the relics of a genuine antiquity. I 

 sauntered on, and the teeth, and vertebra, and dimly-out 

 lined forms of Ichthyosaurs, and Deinosaurs, and flying liz 

 ards, and fishes clad in mail bucklered and helmeted fishes 

 these in succession passed before my eyes. And then 

 winded thoughts flew back through those dim ages of the 

 world s history which we call Mesozoic. I breathed a sti 

 fling atmosphere ; tepid vapors rose all around me ; strange 

 foliage fringed bayous of which I had never heard ; neither 

 bird nor insect stirred the fervid atmosphere ; there were 

 no forests ; the continents were but just arising from their 

 sea-couches, and no footprint had yet been impressed upon 

 their slime-covered heads. And then I thought again of 



