THEIR GEOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS. 99 



specific variety. No doubt the record is very imperfect, 

 and we cannot for a moment suppose that all the forms of 

 life have been revealed by the few scattered patches geolo- 

 gists have examined. Still, there must be a meaning in 

 these lowliest forms of life coming first, in their compara- 

 tive scantiness in the earliest formations, in the gradual 

 appearance of higher and higher forms, and in their in- 

 creasing abundance and specific variety ; and that meaning, 

 if we would interpret without bias or predilection, is 

 surely this that in these old formations we are approach- 

 ing if indeed we have not already reached the dawning 

 of life and the first orderings of that system of progression 

 that still prevails, and is carrying the present along with it. 



Such, once more, is the faint and fragmentary history of 

 the earth's primal periods dim and shadowy loomings of 

 undiscovered lands ; glimpses of broad seas in which the 

 lowlier forms of life spread and increased in numbers, and 

 rose by some great creative law through newer species to 

 higher and higher orders. Fragmentary as the history may 

 seem, it is truly marvellous that science, dealing with such 

 obscure materials, should have been able, within little more 

 than a quarter of a century, to arrive at such satisfactory 

 conclusions. Within the memory of living geologists these 

 Silurian, Cambrian, and Laurentian systems were the 

 " Transition," " Metamorphic," " Hypozoic" (under life), 

 and " Azoic" (void of life) rocks of the systematists ; and 

 now each and all of them have yielded their life-forms 

 proving the great fact, that there is no known period of the 

 earth's history when life, in some form or other, did not 

 exist, and leading to the belief that the manifestation of 

 life on our planet was coeval with the earliest of the strati- 

 fied formations. How wonderful the interest with which 

 these chips and fragments can invest the history of the 



