S8 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



were involved in tlieir construction? Wliat great cosmic and 

 geological trntlisis this mnrmuring ocean endeavoring to reveal? 



In groping after trntli, man passes over the bridge of the 

 known to the dark and shadowy regioi>s of the unknown. Up- 

 ward he treads the rounds of a ladder bottomed upon earth but 

 lost in impenetrable clouds. Yet, when considered in connec- 

 tion with human insignificance, there is much which man has 

 been enabled to learn, and in no department of human knowl- 

 edge has greater progress been made than in that of geology, — ■ 

 a science that underlies, and, to some extent, explains the facts 

 of physical geography. 



*'The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that from the time of 

 their first king, which was eleven tliousand and odd years, the 

 sun had four times altered his course; that the sea and the earth 

 did alternately change into one another."'* New evidences of 

 some of these changes, clear and indisputable, have been found 

 in our own time and country. Upon the American continent, 

 man walks and works, and muses upon mountains and plains 

 once ajoortion of the ocean's bed. Vast quantities of the skele- 

 tons of "monsters of the deep," and marine fauna, of families 

 and genera and species siipposed to l)e now extinct, are entombed 

 in tlie profound deptlis of its rocks. Upon the low, long and 

 narrow islands and keys composing the Baluima Archipelago, in 

 the soft, languid and voluptuous air, we pensively muse above a 

 continent that nature, in one of her sublime convulsions, or by a 

 slow l)ut no less grand process, reij airing cycles of time of vast and 

 inconceivable extent for its completion, has buried from human 

 siglit in the unfathomable depths of a wild waste of waters. 

 There is something grand and appalling in the chaj^ters of the 

 earth's autobiograpliy as disclosed by its continents and ocean 

 isles. Like the astronomer who discerns and translates for us 



* Montaigne. 



