THE REIGN OF REPTILES. 187 



continent could not wipe out. The blood of the thousands 

 and hundreds of thousands who fell on the hundred fierce- 

 ly-contested fields of the " Great Rebellion," and the traces 

 of the manful struggles which they waged, were all washed 

 out by the next spring rains, while even the ripple-marks 

 of the age of Saurians, and the impression of the rain-drops 

 of the passing shower, are perpetuated in all their distinct- 

 ness through ages. Man's history is not written on rocks 

 and river shores. His monuments are not footmarks im- 

 printed on the soil and sands of earth, but achievements of 

 moral and intellectual labor, less perishable than the visible 

 records of the ancient Saurians, because inwrought into the 

 lineaments of the indissoluble soul. 



Even the imperishability of the records of the long ex- 

 tinct reptile suggests honor, and encouragement, and hope 

 to the mind of man. For what are these Saurian footprints 

 so carefully preserved, when man is the only intelligence 

 that can duly ponder their significance ? Are they not the 

 materials of thought which Providence has kindly stored 

 for a thinking race? words of revelation touching the 

 vast movements in which he has been concerned? gleams 

 of light, which stream far down the avenues of the past, and 

 disclose to our astonished eyes embodied forms moving 

 like spectres of night across the marshes and along the 

 shores of mid-eternity ? Well might the heavenly-minded 

 Hitchcock symbolize these teachings by the hinging of a 

 pile of rocky leaves into the similitude of a book. And 

 happily did chance or Providence direct the building of 

 some of the sheets of this rocky volume into the walls of 

 the University at Middletown, where the student, wearied 

 and befogged in the perplexities of human dialects, could 

 look upward to the library-stones of his alma mater, and 

 refresh his soul with the interpretation of the language of 

 the Omniscient. 



