80 
mastodon found at Natchez, on the Mississippi, Sir Charles 
Lyell [Antiquity of Man, p. 200) makes this candid admission : — 
“ After visiting the spot in 1846, I described the geological position of the 
bones, and discussed their probable age, with a stronger bias, I must confess, 
as to the antecedent improbability of the contemporaneous entombment 
of man and the mastodons than any geologist would now be justified in enter- 
taining.” 
Sir Charles Lyell, in the 27th chapter of his Elements, 1865, 
has shown how progressive has been the march of discovery 
in finding relics of supposed more recent creations among 
those of the older. I cannot detain you by quoting as fully 
as I could wish. I will confine myself to one extract only : — 
11 There are many writers still living who, before the year 1854, generalized 
fearlessly on the non-existence of reptiles in times antecedent to the permian ; 
yet in the course of nineteen years they have lived to see the remains of rep- 
tiles of more than one family exhumed from various parts of the carboniferous 
series. Before the year 1818, it was the popular belief that the paleeotherium 
of the Paris gypsum and its associates were the first warm-blooded quadru- 
peds that ever trod the surface of this planet. So fixed was this idea in the 
mind of the majority of naturalists, that when at length the Stonesfield 
mammalia were brought to light, they were most unwilling to renounce their 
creed. First the antiquity of the rock was called in question, and then the 
mammalian character of the relics.” 
Tbe successive creation theory is thus acknowledged again 
and again by Sir Charles Lyell to have been always obstruc- 
tive, never helpful, to the progress of geology. 
But it has not only been crumbling before facts linking 
together the supposed successive strata, by carrying down the 
higher forms of life to lower strata; below the tertiary nearly 
all strata are more or less pelagic in their origin. The medals 
of creation most abundant, and determining their specific cha- 
racter, are the shells and other creatures of marine origin. 
The progress of discovery has been equally steady in discover- 
ing among existing species those thought to be long extinct. No 
species of the terebratulas were supposed to exist till the late 
Captain Ince dredged some up from the harbour of Port J ack- 
son, and only last summer twenty specimens of terebratulas 
were found off the island of Skye, showing the wide distribu- 
tion in our present seas of a creature supposed to be extinct. 
Every geologist must admit how imperfectly the geological 
records available to man's inspection have yet been read. 
Every naturalist will tell you how little really we know of the 
denizens of the sea. Who can tell what marine saurians may 
