Uni] AND SYMBOLS. 373 



luxuriant vegetation of tropical climes, like a royal mantle flung 

 over a festering corpse, the reptile race abound, the poisoned air 

 being to these creatures the very breath of life, and the sur- 

 rounding decay the sustaining power of their existence. Indeed, 

 the object of their lives seems to be, by individual transmuta- 

 tion of poisons into living flesh, to destroy by slow but certain 

 degrees the mass of decaying vegetation, and so to prepare an 

 abiding place for beings of a higher order than themselves. On 

 placing ourselves even in imagination amid such scenes, we seem 

 to be transported back into the former ages of our earth, when 

 man could find no resting-place for his foot, and no atmosphere 

 which he could breathe and live ; when the greater part of the 

 soil was little more than soft mud, the air thick, dank, heavy, 

 and overcharged with decomposition, and the multitude of strange 

 reptiles that bored their slimy way through the deep ooze, 

 crawled lazily upon the slowly hardening banks, or urged their 

 devious course through the turbid waters, were the physically 

 ruling though morally subservient powers of the world. Little 

 is wanting to complete the illusion, except to give to every 

 object an increase of dimensions, for the vegetation of those days 

 was rank and luxuriant to a degree that is now well indicated, 

 though on a smaller scale, by the foliage of the tropics, and the 

 huge forms of the ancient and now extinct reptile race are closely 

 reproduced by the more familiar inhabitants of the swamp before 

 us. As the expanse of putrefaction was greater in those epochs, 

 so the miasma destroyers were larger. Frogs and toads as big 

 as calves, reptilian quadrupeds as large as elephants, and rep- 

 tilian bats expanding leathery wings as wide as those of the 

 pelican, were fit inhabitants of the atmosphere which they 

 breathed, and in which their mission was consummated. Now 

 that the marshy districts are smaller and less poisonous, the 

 reptile race that inhabits them is of smaller dimensions. The 

 earth has now been so far purified by successive generations and 

 regenerations of life and death, added to human ingenuity and 

 industry, that its harmful districts occupy but a comparatively 

 small portion of its surface, the greater part of the world being 

 suitable for human habitations, the black man settling as a 

 pioneer, a hewer of wood and drawer of water, where the white 

 man cannot yet abide. If we turn our attention from the 



