370 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



the mind experiences in discovering the means to seize and 

 comprehend some of the oppressively vast cycles which ge- 

 ology discloses. Here is a geological age — the Post-Ter- 

 tiary Age — unfinished, it is true — which we almost possess 

 the means of measuring. The life of our race reaches back 

 beyond grand geological events. We have some notion, 

 from the jDrogress which our race has made during the pe- 

 riod of written history, what must have been the duration 

 of its infantile tutelage. Nay, the records of the Somme 

 and the Tiniere, as we now decipher them, aiford us a com- 

 mon measure of the age of man and the duration of the 

 Post-Tertiary. The vast changes that have transpired 

 upon the coast of China, the shores of the Mediterranean, 

 and other parts of the world, since man has been a beholder 

 of geological history, seem to carry us back into the midst 

 of the grand events which we have so solemnly and won- 

 deringly contemplated from our seeming distance. These 

 geological intervals, after all, are appreciably finite. The 

 discovery affords a sensible relief to the mind so long op- 

 pressed by the contemplation of cycles which lose them- 

 selves in the haze of eternity. 



One farther thought crowds itself into the company of 

 these reflections. It is -a thought of the growing perfec- 

 tion and exaltation of our race. How have we strug- 

 gled through many ages, upward from companionship with 

 beasts, from clothing of skins or bark, houses of caves, im- 

 plements of chips of flint, a vague consciousness of a Supe- 

 rior Being— like the polyps' sense of light felt through all 

 its body — through all the grades of pupilage, all the de- 

 grees of civilization, all the heights of mental and moral 

 exaltation up to man as he now is ! What a picture of 

 progress is here! How abject once — how exalted, how 

 spiritualized, how God-like now ! Is not man approaching 

 nearer to God ? How vastly less of the brute — how infi- 



