President's A ddress. 
803 
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 with 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 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 wings, filled the dank air 
with bellowing croaks and shrill whistles ; tliere^ where 
ages upon ages afterwards, the wolf howled amidst the dense 
oak forests of Britain, and snuffed the human holocausts 
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