SUPERPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION. 203 



tion. " I have been reading the history of creation in the 

 side of your deep ditch," says the philosopher, " and find the 

 record really very complete. Look there," he adds, pointing 

 to the unfossiliferous strip that mns along the bottom of the 

 bank ; " there, life, both vegetable and animal, first began. It 

 began, struck by electricity out of albumen, as a congeries 

 of minute globe-shaped atoms, — each a hollow sphere within 

 a sphere, as in the well-known Chinese puzzle ; and from 

 these living atoms were all the higher forms progressively 

 developed. The ditch, of course, exhibits none of the atoms 

 with which being first commenced; for the atoms don't keep; 

 — we merely see their place indicated by that unfossiliferous 

 band at the bottom ; but we may detect immediately over it 

 almost the first organisms into which — parting thus early 

 into the two great branches of organic being — they were 

 developed. There are the fucoids, first-born among vege- 

 tables ; and tJiere the zoophytes, well nigh the lowest of the 

 animal forms. The fucoids are marine plants ; for, accord- 

 ing to Oken, * all life is from the sea, — none from the Conti- 

 nent ;' but there, a few feet higher, we may see the remains 

 of reeds and flags, — semi-aqueous, semi-aerial plants, of the 

 comparatively low monocotyledonous order into which the 

 fucoids were developed ; higher still we detect fragments of 

 pines, and, I think, juniper, — trees and shrubs of the land, 

 of an intermediate order, into which the reeds and flags were 

 developed in turn ; and in that peaty layer immediately be- 

 neath the vegetable mould there occur boughs and trunks 

 of blackened oak, — a noble tree of the dicotyledonous divi- 

 sion, — the highest to which vegetation in its upward course 

 has yet attained. Nor is the progress of the other great 

 branch of organized being — that of the animal kingdom — 

 less distinctly traceable. The zoophytes became Crustacea 

 and molluscs, — the Crustacea and molluscs, dog-fishes and 

 herrings, — the dogfish, a low placoid, shot up chiefly into 



