o 
AMERICA THE OLD WORLD. 
of science is so rapidly reconstructing the past 
that we may hope to solve even this problem, 
and to one who looks upon man’s appearance 
upon the earth as the crowning work in a suc- 
cession of creative acts, all of which have had 
relation to his coming in the end, it will not 
seem strange that he should at last he allow cd 
to understand a history which was but the intro- 
duction to his own existence. It is my heliet 
that not only the future, hut the past also, is the 
inheritance of man, and that we shall yet con- 
quer our lost birthright. 
Even now our knowledge carries us far enough 
to warrant the assertion that -there was a time 
when our earth was in a state of igneous fusion, 
when no ocean bathed it and no atmosphere sur- 
rounded it, when no wind blew over it and no 
rain fell upon it, hut an intense heat held all its 
materials in solution. In those days the rocks 
which are now the very bones and sinews of 
our mother Earth — her granites, her porphy- 
ries, her basalts, her syenites — were melted into 
a liquid mass. As I am writing for the unscien- 
tific reader, who may not be familiar with the 
facts through which these inferences have been 
reached, I will answer here a question which, 
were we talking together, he might naturally ask 
in a somewhat skeptical tone. How do you 
know that this state of things ever existed, and, 
