8 Notice of the Wonders of Geology. 



groups and ranges, and with the foundations of countries and con- 

 tinents. Trained in our earher years among the granite hills and 

 trap walls of New England, we have associated with them our 

 youthful preference and almost filial veneration. 



There is a splendid and magnificent association between the 

 active volcano, with its earthquakes, its thunder, its flames, its 

 ignited ejections, and its rivers of molten rock, — and the deep 

 granite foundations which now exhibit the dignity of repose be- 

 neath the superstructure of subsequent formations, although the 

 granite itself was once the victim of fire, and was either raised 

 and injected like the veins and dikes, and lava walls of modern 

 volcanoes, or like the deep lava masses, subsided into quiescence 

 after an ineflectual struggle to throw ofl" or break through an im- 

 pending ocean, or to rend the incumbent strata of the crust of 

 the earth. 



If, however, we are disposed to claim all due respect for our 

 ancient friends, the traps and porphyries, the sienites and the 

 granites, we are delighted with the immense developments of 

 fossils in their successive eras, described and figured as they are 

 with scientific precision and graphic beauty ; while they are re- 

 ferred, by the aid of natural history, to those families of organi- 

 zed beings which, in most instances, have still their analogues on 

 earth, although there is perhaps not a single species below the ter- 

 tiary that is identical with any now existing. 



Our elementary works and occasional memoirs, are in this age, 

 rich in figures and descriptions of organic remains. Italy, Ger- 

 many, Switzerland, France, Britain, and even North America, 

 vie with each other in a zealous and successful cultivation of 

 these branches of natural history. Like the mummies of Egypt, 

 secluded for decades of centuries in their mysterious catacombs, 

 the beings of early geological ages are now disentombed and 

 brought to light, and we do not read with more certainty the an- 

 cient condition of the human race in Egypt, when the Nile flow- 

 ed by the then youthful temples of Thebes, and the solemn av- 

 enues of silent and unmutilated Sphinxes, or that of the Romans, 

 when Vesuvius, with its lava or ashes, and eruptive waters, buried 

 Herculaneum, Stabia, and Pompeii, than we now study the in- 

 habitants of the primitive seas ; the venerable vegetables of the 

 coal formation ; the almost unlimited secular range of the verte- 

 brated fishes ; the amphibious or terrestrial dominion of the fossil 



