AMERICA THE OLD WORLD. 
21 
an archipelago of islands, — that, where the Pyr- 
enees raised their rocky barrier between France 
and Spain, the waters of the Mediterranean and 
Atlantic met, that, where the British Channel 
flows, dry land united England and Franco, and 
Nature in those days made one country of the 
lands parted since by enmities deeper than the 
waters that run between, — when we remember, 
in short, all the fearful convulsions that have 
torn asunder the surface of the earth, as if her 
iocky record had indeed been written on paper, 
we shall find a new evidence of the intellectual 
unity which holds together the whole physical 
history of the globe in the fact that through all 
the storms of time the investigator is able to 
trace one unbroken thread of thought from the 
beginning to the present hour. 
The tree is known by its fruits, — and the 
fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, 
unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, 
unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all 
the geological ages in one chain, a stability of 
purpose that completes in the beings born to-day 
an intention expressed in the first creatures that 
swam in the Silurian ocean or crept upon its 
shores, a steadfastness of thought, practically 
recognized by man, if not acknowledged by him, 
whenever he traces the intelligent connection be- 
tween the facts of Nature and combines them 
