36 



u Some of these phases of chemical history of the sea ; its 

 future ; we speak of it as unchanging. The image of eter- 

 nity comparatively so. Land rises and falls. Here rolls the 

 deep. The sound of streams that swift or slow draw down 

 Eonian Hills. In this struggle the land seemingly succumbs, 

 but really conquers its foe ; slowly, mechanically and chemi- 

 cally it feeds upon the sea ; 5 to 20 percent, of modern rocks 

 is water ; J the ocean. Process still goes on. Cooling 

 globe also ; pores will absorb water ; little by little it will 

 fail, and the time will come when there shall be no more sea. 

 A sealess, waterless continent, from which life is absent. A 

 waste spot in the great creation. Such fate awaits our earth, 

 and all the bodies of our solar system sooner or later, when 

 the sun itself shall have been extinguished and cooled in its 

 turn. Such a period in the process of ages must come, but 

 isjnot final ; 'tis but a follow season in the eternal years of 

 God, and the forces of His universe can again call from out 

 the darkened chaos a new heaven and a new earth. Man. 

 too, how great is that divine gift l>y which he reads the le- 

 of creation and destruction, and can, as in Campbell's grand 

 vision, look on the dying seer." 



Hunt had charge of the Canadian Geological collection at 

 several of the great exhibitions, and his fame and perfect 

 command of the French language led to his appointment to 

 the International Jury at both the Paris Exhibitions of 1855 

 and 1867. He occupied the same honorable position in Lon- 

 don in 1862, and in Philadelphia in 1876. With him jury 

 duty was no mere honorary and perfunctory service, but a 

 task to which he devoted himself with such intentness that 

 he was blind to all else in the exhibition but what it was 

 within his province to study. His official position in Paris 

 in 1855 first opened to him the portals of the great world, 

 and he entered it with all the ardor and high hopes of his 

 impulsive and enthusiastic nature. Some extracts from a 

 letter to an old Norwich friend, written from Paris in Septem- 

 ber, 1855, are interesting biographically as expressing his 

 simple unconscious vanity, and historically as they refer to 



