298 The Morality of Nature 



of years, they will show to the intellectual beings, in actual, 

 visible form, what the life of this age was; and it will be 

 different from the prevailing life; as we know because 

 the life thus revealed now, by old remains, is different from 

 ours. This story of elementary geology is simple but is 

 not to be passed as waste of time. It leads to marvels. 



The simplicity of the process being realized, its reliability 

 can be felt; and the fact now to be emphasized can be con- 

 sidered with less doubt. This fact is that in the beds of 

 debris, which are revealed older and older, as we go deeper 

 and deeper; the life relics are found to be, in backward 

 progress, simpler and simpler. These older beds would of 

 course present most frequently durable forms; if fragile 

 and durable were mixed in similar proportion. Yet as we 

 pass from one strata to another some of the most durable 

 forms disappear first. We find in certain deposits great 

 bones and teeth, and moulds of scales, and prints of feet, 

 relics of the ancestors of elephants and elk and bears and 

 other modern animals and fishes, and deeper we find bones 

 again more primitive, the bones of quadrupeds of lizardlike 

 form, and of birds also lizardlike, but there are no more 

 of the massive bones of elk and elephants nor anything like 

 them. And again deeper we find reptiles, with wings and 

 without them, but no more mammals. And then still deeper 

 the earth is full of fish forms, with and without vertebrae, 

 and of many forms of motile organ, but never a wing or a 

 leg — and deeper still are shell fish and worms, and creatures 

 of simplest form; and deepest of all, where the sediment 

 lies in oldest beds, upon the Archean fire made rock; the 

 eozoon which is known only vaguely, from a mass of sup- 



