THE GEOIiOGIST. 
19 
the shadow of sorrow had passed over it, — e'er man was, and when 
it was God's alone ! 
How strange to look back into the past, liow 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 thmgs of the primeval ocean',s 
deeps — at another contemplatijig enormous reptiles of whale -lilie 
size, sporting in the broad waters of a British Ganges — or we are 
turning 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 hyaena; 
at one time contemplating the luxuriant foliage of a tropical clime, at 
another the floatmg 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 unuitelligible 
to the ignorant than alphabet of Greeks, or hieroglyphic of 
Egy])tians, are the strange characters in which these lessons are 
recorded, but e\ery 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 " fos-sils " are included not only the 
mineralized remains of organic substances, but also the 
impressions or casts of any such bodies, — of a footprint, a worn- 
track, or of a rain-drop, or a ripple-mark — of anytliing 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 eveiything is complicated — elaborated, and every 
fossil, like an old house, bears marks of homely changes and 
associations, suggesting many a ti'ain of incidents and ideas ; and, 
as the preservation of organic remams must be vastly diversified, 
so Avith the differences in the rocks themselves, there will be also 
