President's Address. 



303 



rious life-histories, of deeper import than the astronomer's 

 record of all those infinitudes of wandering fire. Each day 

 the sea, slowly creeping back from its weedy shores, calmly 

 reveals unknown and inexhaustible treasures, or, driven 

 into fury by the storm, casts at our feet rarer gems from 

 its deepest storehouses. Each night its waves glitter with 

 sparks of living light, the handiwork of a Providence which 

 never slumbers nor sleeps. Night after night, o'er all the 

 tide-lashed margins of the deep, the shining kingdoms of 

 the great Polyp-world blaze before the Lord. All the day 

 long stretch they forth their arms motionless waiting 

 their meat from His hand. These, seen but by the seeker, 

 wreathing the worn rocks with garlands of living flowers ; 

 — these, towering up from the sombre depths of the Nor- 

 wegian fiords, lofty as mighty forest trees ; — these, clear 

 and tiny as drops of dew, bounding along the surface of the 

 summer seas ; — these, slow wheeling like stately argosies, 

 trailing their fringed streamers in graceful spirals many a 

 foot behind ; — these, God's workers from the beginning, 

 raising against the Pacific surges vast barriers, before which 

 all the proud erections of man dwindle into insignificance 

 and which shall endure when the boasted monuments of his 

 religion and his fame shall have crumbled into dust. 



Again : — our philosopher, still a wondering child, can look 

 back wuth the geologist, and see " as in a glass darkly," the 

 earth primeval and void, brooded over by the creative spirit 

 of the Almighty. He can view the traces of those mighty 

 elemental wars — those slow millions of years, that lifted the 

 land from the deep; — those slow T millions of years, when the 

 early foliage was creeping over its denuded surface, and the 

 unfolding beauties of the radiata and the mollusc received 

 the approving fiat of Him for whose pleasure they are and 

 were created ; — those slow millions of years, when the brood 

 of the dragon reigned — when gigantic Saurians trailed them- 

 selves through the plashy marshes, darted fish-like through 

 the waters, or, poised on bat-like wungs, filled the dank air 

 with bellowing croaks and shrill whistles ; there, where 

 ages upon ages afterwards, the wolf howled amidst the dense 

 oak forests of Britain, and snuffed the human holocausts 



vol. it. 2 R 



