THE FRONT OF THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 73 



CHAPTER Vin. 



THE FRONT OF THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 



npHE spirits have come forth. The life-giving afflatus 



-*- has been breathed into multitudes of organic forms 



which now teem in the Paleozoic sea. 



" Say, mysterious Earth ! oh say, great Mother and Goddess ! 

 Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled, 

 Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he wooed thee and won thee ? 

 Fair was thy blush, the fairest and first of the blushes of morning ; 

 Deep was the shudder, oh Earth ! the throe of thy self-retention ; 

 July thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy centre ! 

 Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience ; and forthwith 

 Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement, 

 Thousand fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand fold instincts, 

 Filled as a dream the wide waters." 



The long period of almost total lifelessness — the Eozoic 

 Time — it will be remembered, was brought to a close by 

 the upheaval of a long ridge of land, extending from the 

 coast of Labrador to the northern shores of the great lakes, 

 and thence northwest to the Arctic Sea. Corresponding 

 upheavals took place on other continents. A convulsion 

 could not jar one half the globe without being felt upon 

 the other half, and hence it is that all the grand revolu- 

 tions of geology were simultaneous, and the histories of 

 different continents are divided into corresponding chap- 

 ters. We confine our attention, however, to North Amer- 

 ica. The germinal ridge consists of an axis or nucleus of 

 granitic material, and on each side of a series of gneissoid 

 and other eozoic strata sloping like the roof of a house from 

 the central and highest part. We know that this upheaval 

 took place after the deposition of the eozoic strata, because 

 those strata could not have been deposited in their present 



D 



