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ADDRESS. li 
animals has the manifestation of that force been limited to one epoch. Not 
a species of fish that now lives, but has come into being during a compara- 
tively recent period: the existing species were preceded by other species, and 
these again by others still more different from the present. No existing genus 
of fishes can be traced back beyond a moiety of known creative time. Two 
entire orders have come into being, and have almost superseded two 
other orders since the newest of the secondary formations of the earth’s 
crust. 
The axiom of the continuous operation of Creative power, or of the 
ordained becoming of living things, is here illustrated by the class of fishes, 
because that class is exempt from the application of some exterminating 
causes affecting terrestrial and air-breathing animals. 
But the creation of every class of such animals, whether Reptiles, Birds, or 
Beasts, has been successive and continuous, from the earliest times at whichwe 
have evidence of their existence. The reptiles of the coal measures, the great 
birds that impressed the Connecticut sandstones, and the marsupial mam- 
mals of the Stonesfield and Purbeck Oolites, came into being long before 
the Cycloid fishes were created and anterior to the apparition of any 
known existing species of aquatic animal. Species after species of land 
animals, order after order of air-breathing reptiles, have succeeded each 
other; creation ever compensating for extinction. The successive passing 
away of air-breathing species may have been as little due to exceptional 
violence, and as much to natural law, as in the case of marine plants and 
animals. It is true, indeed, that every part of the earth’s surface has been 
submerged; but successively, and for long periods. Of the present dry 
land different natural continents have different faune and flor; and the 
fossil remains of the plants and animals of these continents respectively 
show that they possessed the same peculiar characters, or characteristic 
facies, during periods extending far beyond the utmost limits of human 
history. 
Such, gentlemen, is a brief summary of facts most nearly interesting us, 
which have been demonstratively made known respecting our earth and its 
inhabitants. And when we reflect at how late and in how brief a period of 
historical time the acquisition of such knowledge has been permitted, we 
must feel that, vast as it seems, it may be but a very small part of the 
patrimony of truth destined for the possession of future generations. 
The certain knowledge of the very shape of the earth dates not so far back 
by some centuries as that epoch marked by the revelation, amongst other 
divine truths, of the responsibility of man for the use of the talent entrusted 
to him; and we may well believe that it has been mainly under the sense of 
this responsibility that men have submitted themselves to that patient endu- 
rance of the labour of investigation, experiment, comparison, invention, and 
the pondering on results, often to the utmost reach of mental tension, by 
which the present knowledge of the Divine power has been oe 
