RECENT ADVANCES IN GEOLOGY. 463 
yield with moderate exertion a support, that he can cultivate 
his intellect ; and such culture, I need hardly affirm, is at the 
base of all civilization. 
How great the contrast between the primitive cave-dweller 
and the practical man of to-day, who, availing himself of 
the conquests of science, subjects the forces of N ature to his 
will; who spans with bridges, deep chasms ; who stretches his 
iron rails over high summits; who traverses the trackless 
deep with unerring course; who flashes intelligence over a 
hemisphere. Hw different from the intellbctan] man of to- 
day, who weighs the earth as in a balance ; wlio measures the 
distance of the sun and assays its elements; who maps the 
comet's path; who penetrates the deepest mysteries of 
the Universe. The one was almost a brute; the other is 
almost a god ! 
While these revolutions have taken place on the surface 
of the earth they have, at the same time, been sufficiently 
powerful to modify the marine fauna in the disappearance of 
old and the introduction of new forms to the depth of 1,500 
feet; but in the profounder abysses of the ocean, age after 
` age, the conditions of life have remained comparatively 
unchanged. It is only within the past year that this inter- 
esting fact — a fact which must lead to a material modifica- 
tion of our previously formed views—has been prominently 
developed. 
The soundings made as far hack as 1857, over the great 
telegraphic ‘plateau which stretches from Valentia to New- 
foundland, disclosed in all instances a fine caleareous mud 
which entombed countless millions of shells belonging to the 
family of Rhizopods, and some peculiar bodies which are 
known as Coccoliths and Coccospheres, which were found to 
correspond with the organic contents of the true Cretaceous 
Period. In 1861, among a number of living mollusea and 
corals found adhering to a telegraphic cable between Algiers 
and Sardinia, taken up for repairs, Milne-Edwards detected 
certain shells which were only known as Tertiary fossils. In 
