TEE GAUD EN OF STONE LILIES iQo 



CHAPTER X 



THE GARDEN OF STONE LILIES. 



WE have wandered down through the fiery mazes of 

 the prsesedimentary ages of the world, and have 

 seen the granite, the quartz, feldspar, and mica, the horn- 

 blende, and other first-born products of primeval refrigera- 

 tion organizing themselves in obedience to the molecular 

 forces of Nature; we have witnessed the floods descending, 

 and cubic miles of sediments settling in the bed of the 

 Eozoic sea; we have gazed upon the first flickerings of 

 animated existence, and have noted the fact that while 

 Nature established the procession of organic being with 

 the four sub-kingdoms of animals nearly abreast of each 

 other, the van of each was led by some of the weakest and 

 most abnormal forms which have ever appeared within the 

 circle of their respective types. 



The conditions of existence during the St. John's and 

 Potsdam periods must have been somewhat uniform under 

 all meridians. No continents existed to divert the tidal 

 current into cooler or warmer latitudes, or unequalize the 

 temperature of the atmosphere by their superior power of 

 absorbing and radiating heat. The leading types of exist- 

 ence were trilobites — exhibiting a close relationship with 

 each other on whichever side of the world we exhume their 

 mummied forms — and some inferior brachiopods, which are 

 almost identical in species at St. Petersburg, and at Keese- 

 ville, New York. We have seen that the central portions 

 of the American continent constituted at this time a vast 

 basin of shallow water, the rim of which extended all 



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