is the province of the infant-giant science, Paleontology, to interpret.

The outer shell of the earth is composed, for some miles in depth, of strata or layers, arranged more or less accurately in definite order, and marked by special characteristics in each case so determinate, that the skilled geologist has little difficulty, from inspecting a fragment of any of these, in placing it in its proper position in the series. These characteristics naturally consist, in some measure, of color, texture, and chemical and mechanical composition; but far more important indications than these are the organic remains buried in them, for each of these strata (with few exceptions) is a vast catacomb in which lie buried innumerable generations of creatures that lived and died during the period of its deposition; and these remains are so distinct in each case, that those of one layer can never be confounded with those of any other. The species-sometimes the genera and orders that lived during one formation have passed away in the next; and, as all experience tells, they have passed away never to reappear; their place has been taken by corresponding representatives of the same types, but the one extinct race never revives.

Those who are not familiar with the existence of organic remains may have the fact impressed strongly on their minds by one glance at most of the ordinary gray marble slabs forming our chimney-pieces, etc. There we often see forms so crowded together, that the whole stone would appear almost entirely composed of them; forms that irresistibly remind us of the shells and fragments that strew our shores; so like, that our first natural and correct impression is, that these are really the remains of former living creatures; so unlike in all their minute details, that we can find no one form that is exactly similar to any now living. When we first make these an object of serious thought, question after question pours in upon the mind full of interest: What are these? Are they really former organic existences,

or

mere deceptive simulacra ? How came they here, buried hundreds or thousands of feet deep in solid rock? Why are they so like, and yet so unlike, any of our now living forms? These questions it is the province of the closely allied sciences of geology and paleontology to

answer.

What are these forms? It is perhaps scarcely credible now, yet it is true, that until a comparatively very recent period even men of science failed to recognize the true nature of organic remains. The favorite theory was that they had never formed parts of any living creature, but were developed from a materia pinguis, or fatty matter, under the influence of fermentation. Even the celebrated anatomist Fallopius taught that certain tusks of elephants that had been disinterred were not tusks, but mere earthy concre tions. He also taught that what we consider to be petrified shells were generated by fermentation in the place where they are found; and that they had received their form by means of the "tumultuous movements of terrestrial exhalations.* Others considered that these were formed in the earth under the influence of the stars, or other heavenly bodies; and, again, that they were the failures of na ture in the formation of animals, or the sports of nature. Comparing these with the stern inductive reasoning of many modern investigators, we may well consider paleontology as the science, par ex cellence, of Adequate Causes. About the year 1600, we find Imperati still contending that stones vegetated by force of an "internal principle." However, in 1580, Palissy had boldly promulgated more rational doctrines. "He was the first," said Fontenelle, when, in the French Academy, he pronounced his eulogy, nearly a century and a half later, "who dared assert," in Paris, that fossil remains of testacea and fish had once belonged to marine animals.t

It would scarcely be necessary to allude to these so-called opinions were it not that, in accordance with what Hugh Miller calls the "cycle of nonsense" their absurdities have been gravely reproduced even within the last few years, and not always by men utterly ignorant of science and its laws.

"There are minds [says Professor Owen] who, cognizant of the wonderful structures of the extinct Devonian fishes of the evidences of design and adaptation in their structures-of the altered nature of the sediment around them, and its dependence on the admixture of the decomposing and dissolved soft parts of the old fish

p. 22, ninth edition. * See Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology,

† Ibid. p. 23. + Testimony of the Rocks, p. 388.