compared with the New World. 257 
appear as by the appearance of new beings, their destruction 
necessarily bringing forward others on the scene of life. 
Neither suppose at the same time that, howsoever great the 
differences may appear to you between the old world and the 
new, the facts which were produced in the one are no longer 
reproduced in the other. Physical phenomena have fallen off 
only in their intensity and grandeur since Man set his foot 
on the globe. It may be said that at his approach the earth 
became tranquillized, and that disturbing phenomena by de- 
grees lost their violence. Thus the upheavals which have 
_produced great chains of mountains, such as the Pyrenees, 
the Alps, the Himalaya, and the chain of the Andes, have 
been reduced to such feeble proportions, that they confine 
themselves to casual elevations of the ground, of a few cen- 
timeters, and that not over the entire earth, but at a few 
insulated points. 
Volcanoes—those safety-valves of the globe—have gradu- 
ally diminished since geological times, when vegetation could 
dispense with the gases which they afforded it in the early 
ages. Volcanoes can scarcely now be regarded as formid- 
able, except in the southern hemisphere; they have there 
indeed preserved something of their primitive magnitude 
in the long chain which runs almost throughout the entire 
extent of it. Earthquakes have likewise diminished, both in 
number and intensity—(See Note 20). 
_ Perhaps the same thing has taken place with the aurore 
boreales, those northern suns, whose brilliancy and splendour 
appear to be singularly impaired since climates have divided 
the earth into bands of equal mean temperature; and elec- 
tricity, so intimately connected with heat, has been, like it, 
considerably diminished. 
Lastly, fossiliferous beds—those catacombs in which lie 
buried the flora and fauna of anterior epochs, by means of 
which we are enabled to go backwards through the series of 
ages—have never ceased to be reproduced. Only in the pre- 
sent day they inclose the beings of historical times, instead 
of concealing in their bosom species, all of which have lived 
before the appearance of Man on the earth. 
VOL. LVII. NO. CXIV.— OCTOBER 1854. R 
