$8 {SLES OF SUMMER. 
were involved in their construction? What great cosmic and 
geological truths is this murmuring ocean endeavoring to reveal? 
In groping after truth, man passes over the bridge of the 
known to the dark and shadowy regions of the unknown. Up- 
ward he treads the rounds of a ladder bottomed upon earth but 
lost in impenetrable clouds. Yet, when considered in connec- 
tion with human insignificance, there is much which man has 
been enabled to learn, and in no department of human knowl- 
edge has greater progress been made than in that of geology,— 
a science that underlies, and, to some extent, explains the facts 
of physical geography. 
“The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that from the time of 
their first king, which was eleven thousand and odd years, the 
sun had four times altered his course; that the sea and the earth 
did alternately change into one another.”* New evidences of 
some of these changes, clear and indisputable, have been found 
in our own time and country. Upon the American continent, 
man walks and works, and muses upon mountains and plains 
once a portion of the ocean’s bed. Vast quantities of the skele- 
tons of ‘‘monsters of the deep,” and marine fauna, of families 
and genera and species supposed to be now extinct, are entombed 
in the profound depths of its rocks. Upon the low, long and 
narrow islands and keys composing the Bahama Archipelago, in 
the soft, languid and voluptuous air, we pensively muse above a 
continent that nature, in one of her sublime convulsions, or by a 
slow but no less grand process, requiring cycles of time of vast and 
inconceivable extent for its completion, has buried from human 
sight in the unfathomable depths of a wild waste of waters. 
There is something grand and appalling in the chapters of the 
earth’s autobiography as disclosed by its continents and ocean 
isles. Like the astronomer who discerns and translates for us 
* Montaigne, 
