298 FOOT-NOTES FROM A PAGE OF SAND. 
useful or curious, beautiful or monstrous; the waves them- 
selves, in ceaseless change, incessantly battling with the 
land, seem life-like; but the sand itself, solid and motion- 
less, looks lifeless. The great broad sheet that stretches 
along the coast seems to be now, as it always has been, in- 
animate. A vast bed of silica; and yet if not alive, what a 
sarcophagus it is of myriad lives since perished !- If the poet 
says of dust in the crack of a door, "Great Cesar's ashes 
here!" and attach to the mote and the man common and 
equal significance, yet farther than this the naturalist; for 
him, not the greatest pile that ever rose over emperors' re- 
mains— not the pyramids,* tombs of Pharaohs, are so great, 
as this monument of life that Nature built —the simple sand. 
If ghosts be ever laid, here lie hosts, of creatures innumer- 
able, vexing the mind in the attempt to conceive, never to 
compute, them ; so minute that a grain of sand is prodigious 
beside. Creatures of wonderful, beautiful, varying shapes; 
creatures that ate and drank after their fashion and went on 
rejoicing or grieving till the day came. Let us write a name 
in the sand; the wave comes — the ebb, the cradle, — the 
flow, the grave — of such short-lived creatures ; what to these 
then, that write their name in the “sands of time ;” the coast 
of a continent their grave, the beach their monument, each 
sand-grain an epitaph. 
How long this book has been making we do not know; 
no man's time will suffice him to turn and read even a single 
page. Reflection confounds; still we may stroll on, obser- 
vant, if not thoughful; a letter, a point, an intelligible note, 
may catch the eye ; and trifles enough have at least some pith. 
Say, at the moment, there is no living thing in sight. Asa 
wave curls away from the mirrored sand, little bubbles play 
here and there for a few moments, and then too subside. 
Under the sand, where each bubble rose, lives a creature, 
* And these too, are of a sort of lime stone, called * nummulitic ” — chiefly 
pamposed of vast mam bere o certain Foramimfers esecereit es). Ano of din ram- 
ur millions of these aon 
