Association of American Geologists and Naturalists. 277 



we of this generation can hope to do, is by uncovering the main parts 

 of the buried temple to disclose its vast dimensions and some portion 

 of its elaborate external beauty ; but to penetrate its shrines and read 

 upon its inner walls the whole narrative of its origin and construction, 

 is the glorious privilege which awaits a future age. 



Geology grows more interesting as we penetrate into the deeper se- 

 crets of the past, as we leave the obvious and commonplace phenome- 

 na and reach the recondite and remote, in the midst of which, as in 

 the moral and intellectual recesses of the human constitution, would 

 seem to lie the only true and actual indexes of the great forces which 

 sway events. It is this very power to reconstruct the past which con- 

 fers on geology its most distinctive feature, and has placed it in so em- 

 inent a rank among the sciences. 



I question if many minds, even among those devoted to geological 

 research, are impressed with the wonderful extent to which this science 

 is likely in future ages to carry the restoration of antiquity, reproducing 

 in vivid distinctness the ancient geography, climate, and inhabitants of 

 the globe, tracing the many successive oceans, bays, and shores, and 

 repeopling for each epoch all the waters and the land ; I question if we 

 are at all aware how completely the whole history of all departed time 

 lies indelibly recorded with the amplest minuteness of detail in the suc- 

 cessive sediments of the globe, how effectually in other words every 

 period of time has written its oion history, carefully preserving every 

 created form and every trace of action. 



Each broad stratum, to the very thinnest, be it remembered, was 

 once the sustaining surface of its region, supported therefore all that 

 the earth then possessed of its teeming generations, and received in 

 some form, either perfect or mutilated, every living or organized thing. 

 While the waters above it were the cradle and the theatre of a multi- 

 tude of races, it was the universal tomb, receiving them all into its soft 

 bosom in every stage of their life, and thus recording the minutest par- 

 ticulars of their individual biography. Let us reflect too that in these 

 successively superimposed surfaces we have sequences of continuous 

 time of all amounts, from intervals the minutest to ages the most pro- 

 tracted, so that we behold the birth, the spread and the extinction of 

 long enduring races, no less than of individual beings, and illustrated 

 by the movements of every contemporaneous physical condition and 

 event. The life of races is thus disclosed, and how magnificent and 

 vast are its higher and profounder laws compared with those which 

 mark the development of single and fast fleeting individuals. 



Vol. xLvii, No. 2.— July-Sept. 1844. 36 



