4 ~o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE GEEAT CEMETERY IN COLORADO. 



By KEV. SAMUEL LOCK WOOD, Pn. D. 



IN the composition of his ecclesiastical history, an erudite historian 

 chaptered the narrative into centuries. Perhaps for his subject 

 these divisions were sufficiently generous. Still, as measurements of 

 time they were but puny epochs ; and yet they were vast enough for 

 the treatment of that ephemeral worker, man. But He, " who work- 

 keth hitherto " — who, as the true Earth's Biographer, wrote on the 

 stony rocks — made his divisions the Ages ! Indeed, can those 

 epochs be reduced to years ? What a scope must the record of his 

 doings have with whom a thousand years are as a day ! Accepting 

 these life-cycles with a significance so grand, we reverently look into 

 this great volume. Its opening chapter is the Cambrian age. But — 

 amazing ! — the stony laminse that make up its leaves are scarcely less 

 than one hundred thousand feet in thidcness ! It was a time of dreary 

 wildness, and its primeval life-forms were few, and huge rock-masses 

 were tilted up from that sea, and worn down for the bed of the waters. 

 Next came the Silurian age, singing the weird music of its one world- 

 encircling sea. Its forms of life were innumerable. Then flourished 

 the Brachiopods, or shell-bearing worms, and Mollusca, Crustacea, 

 corals, and a few fishes. Then comes the Devonian age. Now it is 

 that what seemed a monotonous, watery waste becomes as a weary 

 Sahara, with many a green-fringed oasis cheered. The late universal 

 sea is dotted with low-lying islands. Very beautiful, though lowly 

 in rank, and not over-luxuriant in numbers, were the plant-forms that 

 fringed those shores. Then the fishes composed the nobility of life. 

 Their patterns were grotesque ; and they were clad in mighty plate- 

 armor, massive osseous tiles, of quaintly sculpture. It was an arma- 

 ture that spoke unmistakably of crimson conflicts; for, in sooth, these 

 were not " piping times of peace." N"ext came the Carboniferous age. 

 The area of land is greatly increased ; and it is beautified with a new 

 and amazingly luxuriant vegetation. In this plant regime the queen- 

 liest beinsj is the arborescent fern. And this luxuriant vegetation 

 stores up the solar force, a rich legacy for the far-off but " coming 

 man." At this time a few air-breathers occupy the land. With frog- 

 like affinities, they are of very low reptilian rank. 



Passing the Permian and the Jurassic, next comes the Cretaceous 

 age, with the culmination of that reptilian race of monsters of amaz- 

 ing size and most singular aspects. It was, indeed, the companionship 

 of " Beauty and the Beast ; " for at this time, also, the nautilus, and 

 the ammonite, those peerless structures of the molluscan life, 

 reveled in beauty and vastness of numbers. But a sad change came, 

 and the gay nautilus tribe was reduced to the merest representation 



