ADDRESS. Hx 



tants which received in primeval times the gift of life, and filled the land, 

 sea, and air with rejoicing myriads, through innumerable revolutions of the 

 planet, before in the fulness of time it pleased the Giver of all good to place 

 man upon the Earth, and hid him look up to Heaven. 



Wave succeeding wave, the forms of ancient life sweep across the ever- 

 changing surface of the earth ; revealing to us the height of the land, the 

 depth of the sea, the quality of the air, the course of the rivers, the extent of 

 the forest, the system of life and death — yes, the growth, decay, and death 

 of individuals, the beginning and ending of races, of many successive races 

 of plants and animals, in seas now dried, on sand-banks now raised into 

 mountains, on continents now sunk beneath the waters. 



Had that series a beginning ? Was the earth ever uninhabited, after it 

 became a globe turning on its axis and revolving round the sun ? Was there 

 ever a period since land and sea were separated — a period which we can 

 trace — when the land was not shaded by plants, the ocean not alive with 

 animals '? The answer, as it comes to us from the latest observation, declares 

 that in the lowest deposits of the most ancient seas in the stratified crust of 

 the globe, the monuments of life remain. They extend to the earliest sedi- 

 ments of water, now in part so changed as to appear like the products of fire. 

 What life ? Only the simpler and less specially organized fabrics have as 

 yet rewarded research among these old Laurentian rocks — only the aggre- 

 gated structures of Foraminifera have been found in what, for the present at 

 least, must be accepted as the first deposits of the oldest sea. The most 

 ancient of all known fossils, the Eozoon Canadense of Sir W. Logan, is of 

 this low, we may even say lowest, type of animal organization. 



Then step by step we are guided through the old Cambrian and Silurian 

 systems, rich in Trilobites and Brachiopoda, the delights of Salter and Da- 

 vidson ; with Agassiz and Miller and Egerton we read the history of the 

 strange old fishes of the Devonian rocks ; Brongniart, and Goppert, and 

 Dawson, and Binney, and Hooker unveil the mystery of the mighty forests 

 now converted to coal ; Mantell and Owen and Huxley restore for us the 

 giant reptiles of the Lias, the Oolite, and the Wealden ; Edwards and 

 Wright almost revive the beauteous corals and echinodermata ; which Avith 

 all the preceding tribes have come and gone before the dawn of the later 

 periods, when fragments of mammoths and hippopotami were buried in 

 caves and river sediments to reward the researches of Cuvier and Buckland, 

 Prestwich and Christy, Lartet and Falconer. 



And what is the latest term in this long series of successive existence ? 

 Surely the monuments of ever- advancing art — the temples whose origin is in 

 caverns of the rocks ; the cities which have taken the place of holes in the 

 ground, or heaps of stones and timber in a lake ; the ships which have out- 

 grown the canoe, as that was modelled from the floating trunk of a tree, are 

 sufficient proof of the late arrival of man upon the Earth, after it had under- 

 gone many changes and had become adapted to his physical, intellectual, and 

 moral nature. 



Compared with the periods which elapsed in the accomplishment of these 

 changes, how short is the date of those yet standing monoliths, cromlechs, 

 and circles of unhewn stone which are the oldest of human structures raised 

 in Western Europe, or of those more regular fabrics which attest the early 

 importance of the monarchs and people of Egypt, Assyria, and some parts of 

 America ! Yet tried by monuments of natural events which happened within 

 the age of man, the human family is old enough in Western Europe to have 

 been sheltered by caverns in the rocks, while herds of reindeer roamed in 



