CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORY. 395 



such facts and it remains only to illustrate our position by a few ex- 

 amples, in general, not novel, but duly connected, to sustain the 

 argument. 



Fossil Fish of Mount Bolca. 



The beautiful fossil fish* more than 100 species of which are found 

 in marly limestone, in Mount Bolca, near Verona in Italy, inform us 

 that they were once living and active beings; just before those hills 

 were deposited, and when the waters stood over the place where the 

 fish were entombed, in the bottom of the sea, the rock which con- 

 tains their skeletons was formed around them, doubtless in the state 

 of a calcareous sediment ; this calcareous stratum was then over- 

 whelmed by a submarine eruption of molten rock, and the heat was 

 not communicated through the bad conducting substance of the marl 

 to the destruction of the organic forms ; then again, and still on the 

 bottom of the sea, the calcareous rock was formed anew with its 

 enclosed fish; again the molten rock flowed over the calcareous marl 

 and so on in several successions. But this is not all ; this remark- 

 able formation is now several miles from the Adriatic, the nearest 

 sea, and it rises 1200 feet above it. It is plain then, not only that the 

 whole was successively formed beneath the ocean, but that the hill, 

 with the country to which it belongs, was raised afterwards by sub- 

 terranean power, and that the surrounding waters have also retired 

 and have, ages since, left only dry land. 



Organic Remains in Early Rocks. 



In very early, and often deeply seated rocks, coming immediately 

 after the primitive and usually called the transition, we find the first 

 traces of organized beings ; the perfect impresses of plants, with the 

 earliest coal, and both the impresses and the entire mineralized bodies 

 of millions of animals ; the deposition of these rocks v/as therefore 

 cotemporary with or subsequent to, the creation and propagation of 

 the organized beings whose impresses, or whose forms they contain, 

 and it is selfevident, that these rocks could not have been deposited 

 prior to the date of the animals and vegetables included in them. 



Both the plants and animals lived and died at or near the places 

 where they are found entombed in the rocks ; for in most instances, 

 they present few or no marks of violence, or of accident ; their del- 



* Of which there are splendid specimens in the cabinet of Yale College. 



