THE SILURIAN BEACH. 
l 6l 
Worms, for Star-Fishes and Sea-Urcliins, and we 
may find here and there a fish stranded on the 
sand or tangled in the sea-weed. Let us remem- 
ber, then, that, in the Silurian period, the world, 
so far as it was raised above the ocean, was a 
beach, and let us seek there for such creatures as 
God has made to live on sea-sliores, and not be- 
little the Creative work, or say that He first scat- 
tered the seeds of life in meagre or stinted meas- 
ure, because we do not find air-breathing animals 
when there was no fitting atmosphere to feed 
their lungs, insects with no terrestrial plants to 
live upon, reptiles without marshes, birds with- 
out trees, cattle without grass, all things, in 
short, without the essential conditions for their 
existence. 
What we do find, — and these, as I shall en- 
deavor to show my readers, in such profusion 
that it would seem as if God, in the joy of crea- 
tion, had compensated Himself for a less variety 
of forms in the greater richness of the early 
types, — is an immense number of beings belong- 
ing to the four primary divisions of the Animal 
Kingdom, but only to those classes whose repre- 
sentatives are marine, wdiose home then, as now 
was either in the sea or along its shores. In 
other words, the first organic creation expressed 
in its totality the structural conception since 
carried out in such wonderful variety of details. 
