164 



SKETCHES OF UUEATION. 



CHAPTER XV. 



THE SCOUTS OF THE REPTILE HORDE. 



EMPIRES rose upon the earth, and crumbled in succes- 

 sion to decay, a thousand ages before the foot of 

 Adam had pressed the soil of the Garden of Eden. A se- 

 ries of dynasties flitted like shadows over the face of our 

 planet, and disappeared beneath the dim horizon of the past, 

 while the empire of man was but an idea dwelling in the 

 Almighty Mind. Here were morning and evening, invig- 

 orating sunlight and cooling dew, softly-wooing breeze and 

 fiercely-maddened tempest, springtime and autumn, weep- 

 ing clouds and placid evening sky, Winter piping his mel- 

 ancholy song upon the withered reeds of Summer, ocean- 

 surges waging everlasting battle with the rocky shore, 

 God alone spectator of the progress of the mighty work 

 which was being accomplished. But there was life, and mo- 

 tion, and consciousness, and enjoyment, and death through 

 all those dim and distant ages. Those dim and distant 

 ages — how imagination halts, and faints, and falters in the 

 effort to shoot back over the infinite stretch of years ! 

 Life was here, but without a voice, without a wing, without 

 a footstep. The ignoble mollusc held dominion in the sea 

 through all the morning twilight of animated existence. 



The mute fish reared his empire on the ruins of that of 

 the mollusc. In the middle Paleozoic ages this first and 

 lowest form of vertebrate existence appeared in all the seas 

 — not fishes clothed in horny scales like those which swarm 

 in the waters of the human era, but fishes clad in coat of 

 mail, bucklered aud helmeted with bony plates, and armed 



