152 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



been noticed, and the active progress of coral reefs proves the 

 vast proportion of space beneath the waves, either still sinking 

 lower, or again in a reiiscending state. Volcanic cones, far 

 from continents, like flaming beacons at sea, towards the South 

 Pole, as Hecla is in the north, may be elaborating elements for 

 future geogonies, or heave up regions now sunken, on the 

 southern side of the equator, more particularly where a 

 peculiar zoology, living and fossil, appears to point out that 

 one existed a. an anterior period; and, by the evidence of the 

 great Struthionidae, such as Dinornis, only recently extinct, 

 that animals of such bulk w-cre not originally confined to 

 islands not larger than New Zealand; which, moreover, is 

 /eplete with craters nearly all dormant. 



The foregoing statements have been submitted, in this place, 

 somewhat more at length than the nature of the present volume 

 would seem to warrant ; but we apprehend, no view of 

 the primeval history of Man can be complete, without reference 

 to the conditions of existence which obtained in the first more 

 calamitous ages of his presence on earth. Though particular 

 points in the changes here alluded to may be doubted or denied, 

 still sufficient will remain to substantiate the influence they 

 must have exercised upon human distribution, upon man's 

 earliest wanderings ; and they will finally establish, we think, 

 the fact of his coexistence with the latter period of the great 

 Pachydermous era. We have, in fact, both sacred and profane 

 authority for diluvian convulsions of great magnitude, when 

 the earth was inhabited by human families, in quarters very 

 distant from each other, and when many genera of animals 

 may have perished. If, in the opinion of geologists, more than 

 due importance has been ascribed to the action of volcanoes, 

 the answ r er is, that the violence of subterrene fires w r as unques- 

 tionably much greater, and its presence much more generally 

 manifested, than in succeeding ages ; since it can be shown 



