AMERICA THE OLD WORLD. 
10 
the eruptions of melted materials, which not only 
altered the character of those earliest stratified 
rocks, hut destroyed all the organic remains con 
taincd in them. It will lie my object to show in 
this series of papers, not only that the absence 
of the climatic and atmospheric conditions essen- 
tial to organic life, as we understand it, must 
have rendered the previous existence of any liv- 
ing beings impossible, but also that the complete- 
ness of the Animal Kingdom in those deposits 
where we first find organic remains, its intelli- 
gible and coherent connection with the succes- 
sive creations of all geological times and with the 
animals now living, afford the strongest internal 
evidence that we have indeed found in the lower 
Silurian formations, immediately following the 
Azoic, the beginning of life upon earth. When 
a story seems to us complete and consistent from 
the beginning to the end, we shall not seek for a 
first chapter, even though the copy in which we 
have read it be so torn and defaced as to suggest 
the idea that some portion of it may have been 
lost. The unity of the work, as a whole, is an 
incontestable proof that we possess it in its origi- 
nal integrity. The validity of this argument will 
be recognized, perhaps, only by those naturalists 
to whom the Animal Kingdom lias begun to 
appear as a connected whole. For those who do 
not see order in Nature it can have no value. 
