298 0. C. Marsh—New Tertiary Reptiles. 
adaptation did not wait for man’s coming, nor were they ever 
stereotyped. Organic Nature,—by which I mean the system and 
totality of living things, and their adaptation to each other and to 
the world,—with all its apparent and indeed real stability, should 
be likened, not to the ocean, which varies only by tidal oscilla- 
tions from a fixed level to which it is always returning, but 
rather to a river so vast that we can neither discersi its shores 
nor reach its sources, and whose onward flow is not’ less actual 
because too slow to be observed by the ephemere which hover 
over its surface or are borne upon its bosom. 
Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and not 
long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the natural- 
ists of the present day that hardly a discourse can be pronounced 
or an investigation prosecuted without reference to them. I 
suppose that the views here taken are little if at all in advance 
of the average scientific mind of the day. I cannot regard them 
as less noble than those which they are succeeding. 
An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, has 
recently and truthfully said : * 
“Tt is a singular fact that when we can find out how anything 
- done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it. 
I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is pe 
_ and unworthy ; I will add deplorable. Through what faults 
or infirmities of dogmatism on the one hand and scepticism 0? 
the other it came to be so thought, we need not here consider. 
Let us hope, and I confidently expect, that it is not to last; that 
the religious faith which survived without a shock the notion 
of the fixity of the earth itself, may equally outlast the notion 0 
the absolute fixity of the species which inhabit it; that, in the 
future even more than in the past, faith in an order which 1s 
the basis of science will not (as it cannot reasonably) be dis: 
severed from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion 
iene. 
Art. XXXIX.—Preliminary Description of New Tertiary 
Reptiles; by O. C. Marsh. Parr L 
_ THE remains described in this paper are from the early bet 
tiary deposits of the Rocky Mountain region, and were dis- 
covered by the Yale College party during their explorations 
summer and autumn of last year. The localities are nearly 
* Darwinism in Morals, in Theological Review, April, 1871. 
