THE GEOLOGIST. 



19 



the shadow of soitow had passed over it, — e'er man was, and when 

 it was God's alone ! 



How strange to look back into the past, how marvellous the 

 changes, how wonderful the contrasts presented by the things 

 which were and those which are. At one time we are regarding 

 the myriads of small and crawling things of the primeval ocean's 

 deeps — at another contemplating enormous reptiles of whale like 

 size, sporting in the broad waters of a British Ganges — or we are 

 turnmg in mental revision to the herds of gigantic oxen and deer 

 browsing on verdant plains — the associates of the hairy mammoth, 

 rhinoceros and hippopotamus — the prey of the cave bear and hysena; 

 at one time contemplating the luxuiiant foliage of a ti*opical clime, at 

 another the floating icebergs and their stony burthens. Dream- 

 like indeed are our \isions of the past, — mysterious and solemn 

 as our own being and existence, are the lessons which have been 

 read in the dead language of the mountains. More unintelligible 

 to the ignorant than alphabet of Greeks, or hieroglyphic of 

 Egyptians, are the strange characters in which these lessons are 

 recorded, but every letter is a volume, for these letters are fossils. 

 Surely then, it is worth while asking, even if for the benefit of no 

 one else than of those who have never thought about these things, 

 — and a magazine, like a missionary, goes to strange and far 

 distant places, and it may put the questions where they were little 

 likely to have been put at all — What is a fossil, and what is its 

 value ? 



Under the term ^'fossils" are included not only the 

 mineralized remains of organic substances, but also the 

 impressions or casts of any such bodies, — of a footpi-int, a worm- 

 track, or of a rain-drop, or a ripple-mark — of anything indeed 

 which was once part of^ or was in any way associated with the 

 existence or conditions of any living object of a past creation, and 

 not being actually a mere rock or stone, or in other words a 

 mineral mass. 



In Geology everything is complicated — elaborated, and every 

 fossil, like an old house, bears marks of homely changes and 

 associations, suggesting many a train of incidents and ideas ; and, 

 as the preservation of organic remains must be vastly diversified, 

 so with the differences in the rocks themselves, there will be also 



