LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 
75 
Organic Life as a Geological and Geographical Agency. 
Tlie quantitative value of organic life, as a geological 
agency, seems to be inversely as the volume of the individual 
organism ; for nature supplies by numbers what is wanting in 
the bulk of the plant or animal out of whose remains or struc¬ 
tures she forms strata covering whole provinces, and builds 
up from the depths of the sea large islands, if not continents. 
There are, it is true, near the mouths of the great Siberian 
rivers which empty themselves into the Polar Sea, drift islands 
composed, in an incredibly large proportion, of the bones and 
tusks of elephants, mastodons, and other huge pachyderms, 
and many extensive caves in various parts of the world are 
half filled with the skeletons of quadrupeds, sometimes lying 
loose in the earth, sometimes cemented together into an osse¬ 
ous breccia by a calcareous deposit or other binding material. 
These remains of large animals, though found in comparatively 
late formations, generally belong to extinct species, and their 
modern congeners or representatives do not exist in sufficient 
numbers to be of sensible importance in geology or in geog¬ 
raphy by the mere mass of their skeletons.* But the vegetable 
wheat sown there by Friar Jodoco Rixi, of Ghent. It was preserved as a 
relic.” 
The Adams of modern botany and zoology have been put to hard shifts in 
finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought 
before them, “ to see what they would call themand naturalists and 
philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws 
of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It 
is much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English tech¬ 
nical equivalents for the German verwildert , run-wild, and veredelt , im¬ 
proved by cultivation. 
* Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed 
by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected 
into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of ex¬ 
tinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be 
called mountains. There were in the United States, in 1860, as we shall 
see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions of horses, black cattle, 
sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the 
British American Provinces and in Mexico, and there are large herds of 
