84 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



the wear and tear of rocks which were formed in still older 

 oceans. 



But, great as is the magnitude of these physical changes 

 of the world, they have been accompanied by a no less 

 striking series of modifications in its living inhabitants. 

 All the great classes of animals, beasts of the field, fowls 

 of the air, creeping things, and things which dwell in the 

 waters, flourished upon the globe long ages before the 

 chalk was deposited. Very few, however, if any, of these 

 ancient forms of animal life were identical with those which 

 now live. Certainly not one of the higher animals was of 

 the same species as any of those now in existence. The 

 beasts of the field, in the days before the chalk, were not 

 our beasts of the field, nor the fowls of the air such as those 

 which the eye of men has seen flying, unless his antiquity 

 dates infinitely further back than we at present surmise. 

 If we could be carried back into those times, w^e should be 

 as one suddenly set down in Australia before it was col- 

 onized. We should see mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, 

 insects, snails, and the like, clearly recognizable as such, 

 and yet not one of them would be just the same as those 

 with which we are familiar, and many would be extremely 

 different. 



From that time to the present, the population of the 

 world has undergone slow and gradual, but incessant, 

 changes. There has been no grand catastrophe— no de- 

 stroyer has swept away the forms of life of one period, and 

 replaced them by a totally new creation: but one species has 

 vanished and another has taken its place; creatures of one 

 type of structure have diminished, those of another have 

 increased, as time has passed on. And thus, while the 

 differences between the living creatures of the time before 

 the chalk and those of the present day appear startling, if 



