THE FRONT OF THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 75 



then existed. The Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies 

 were not yet born from the deep. Where were the United 

 States ? Where the broad valley of the Mississippi, and 

 the wide-extended plains of the far West ? Beneath the 

 wave, and receiving the sediments of the same sea which 

 rolled over the future sites of Babylon, and Tyre, and 

 Athens, and the seven hills of the " Eternal City." The 

 generations of men yet slumbered in the chambers of futu- 

 rity. The order of Providence had assigned them their posi- 

 tion in the grand procession of life which was now beginning 

 to move, and the scouts of which had passed by in the pre- 

 ceding age; but we must wait for man till a long line of gro- 

 tesque and marvelous forms has marched before our view. 

 The van of this procession was led by some of the hum- 

 bler forms of God's creation. We shall indeed look in vain 

 for a type of existence of simpler mould than the Lauren- 

 tian Eozoon. It is likely that beings akin to this accom- 

 panied the shoals of higher forms which sprang into exist- 

 ence at the morning dawn of the Silurian Age. But if 

 they lived, the record of their existence has been effaced 

 from the earth. Like the deeds and the sufferings of the 

 men who kept company with the extinct quadrupeds of Eu- 

 rope, and chased the fur-clad mammoth across the steppes 

 of Siberia, their very existence is reached only by conject- 

 ure, and the activities which made up life with them have 

 all been locked up with the arcana of the past. The creat- 

 ures whose relics we have disentombed were more highly 

 gifted than the Eozoon, and were launched into being un- 

 der a great variety of forms. The oldest Silurian rocks of 

 North America are perhaps those revealed to science upon 

 the island of Newfoundland by the assiduity of the Cana- 

 dian geologists. Their records have been recently studied 

 by the paleontologist Billings, of Montreal, an investigator 

 eminent for acuteness and for the importance of his paleon- 



