as the unit of time, the existence of a species, and those who prefer, as the measure of that unit, the deposition of a given quantity of mud. I. The Azoic Strata... Geographical Miles. .4.333 .5 082 .4.458 .4.512 18.385 During the periods represented by these eighteen miles of strata, the creative force that produced species of animals was very variously exercised. From this representation it is evident that the crustaceans were produced most rapidly at the close of the Lower Paleozoic period; that the reptiles reached their inaximum of development at the beginning of the Neozoic period; that the fishes enjoyed two maxima of rapidity of production, one at the commencement of the Upper Palæozoic, and the other at the commencement of the Neozoic period; and that the mammals approached their greatest rate of production at the close of the Neozoic, and commencement of the Historical period, just previous to the creation of man. In the opinion of the latter, the former class of geologists have greatly exaggera ted the duration of the Secondary and Tertiary periods, in consequence of the more rapid change in organic life, which has characterized these latter periods as compared with the Paleozoic epochs. Let any one consider, for a moment, the analogous case of history. Let him compare the Empire of China with the Republic of Greece. From the time that the three hundred Spartans, under Leonidas, fought at Thermopyla, to defend their country against the innumerable hosts of the Persians, to the time when Demosthenes uttered his Philippics, a period of somewhat less than three hundred years elapsed. Let any man having a heart to feel, who can understand his tory, and poetry, and the ideas which great men are capable of giving to their descendants, compare these three hundred years of Greece's history, with the three These represent the zoological importhousand years by which the great Em-tance of the crustaceans, fishes, reptiles, pires of Japan and Cathay reckon their and mammals at each period of the earth's ages, and let him say to which would he history. give the greater importance. The answer would be obvious. In like manner, I believe, the greater interest that these recent deposits possess induces us to regard them in such a way as to lead us to magnify their importance, and to transfer to them a dignity which can not spring from the length of time to which they can lay claim. I do not mean to say that a mile of mud and a mile of limestone represent the same period of time; but that a mile of limestone in the older world represents the same period-as far as we can judge -as a mile of limestone does in the later periods of the world; and when we find in the older periods five species per mile of limestone, and in the later ages fifty, we are not therefore to conclude that the period of the one is not of equal duration with that of the other. The most recent information we possess on the subject leads me to the conclusion that the following scale represents the thickness, and, as I believe, consequently, the duration of the four great periods into which the strata of the globe may be divided: These four classes of animal life have never coëxisted in equal amount on the surface of our globe, but have reigned in succession, as the dominant races that ruled their fellows, both by force of numbers and by virtue of superior bulk and intelligence. The crustaceans attained their maximum of development in the Lower Palæozoic period, attaining a proportion of twentyfour per cent, or nearly one fourth of the coëxisting species. The fishes succeeded the crustaceansnot gradatim, but per saltum - and in the Upper Palæozoic period attained a proportion of twenty-four per cent of the coexisting species. A glance at the crustaceans and fishes is sufficient to show that the law prevailed in the history of the earth, that a dethroned race never again acquired the ascendency it once had. The crustaceans and fishes both made an attempt to resume their former position at the commencement of the Neozoic period, but appear to have been rapidly extinguished by the dominant reptiles, who at that time rose to eminence, and reached the high proportion of twenty-four per cent of the coëxistent species. The zoological importance of the reptiles rapidly declined, and they were succeeded in the government of the world by the mammals, which finally attained a preponderance of twenty-two per cent at the period immediately preceding the creation of man-the last, the most powerful, and the most cruel of the successive races that have governed the globe since it was first inhabited. It appears, therefore evident, that four successive races have lived and ruled upon this globe; that they have succeeded each other abruptly, and not by transition of one species into another; and that their power was partly due to numbers, and partly due to superior size and force. nating in man as their ultimate and highest development; but their rule is over and gone; for even adding man, who rep resents but a single species in number, they have fallen from twenty-two to five per cent of the coëxisting fossilizable species, and have lost their ascendency as completely as the crustaceans, the fishes, and the reptiles, whom they have succeeded, but from whom they are not de. scended. Who, then, and what, are we, who now govern the globe with a more absolute and monarchical sway than the other dynasties that have preceded us? We govern as the vicegerents of God, made in his image, and in no respect more so than in this: that we rule, not by dint of numbers, not by virtue of superior size or strength, but by the power of intelligence, which enables us, though only a single species, to subjugate the globe. est race that ruled our globe, by virtue of intelligence, and not of brute force, until the sound of the dread trump shall call upon the sea and land to give up their dead, and the monarch created in the image of God shall be summoned to give account of the manner in which he discharged his appointed trust. In this rapid sketch of life upon our globe it is impossible to enter into details; but there are some points so striking in relation to the reign of the fishes and that of the mammals, that I shall briefly mention them. Thus, four successive aristocracies lived and flourished on the surface of this globe Thus, then, it happens, that although before "God created man in his own man, representing only a single species, image" to people it and to have dominion could never appear as the monarch of over all. It appears that these aristocrats, the globe, yet his dominion will be proved the crustaceans, fishes, reptiles, and mam- to future geologists by another and equalmals, each attained, in that order of suc- ly certain test, namely, the universal districession, their maximum degree of devel-bution of his remains. Every land on the opment and importance. They lived, they globe and the floor of every sea will conflourished, they had their day; they detain the fossil traces of the last and greatclined again, and are past and gone as much from us as the dynasties of Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Now will any man who reads the history of the human race tell us that Assyria produced Babylon; that Babylon produced Alexander; that Alexander made Cæsar? He would be regarded as a lunatic who would hold such a doctrine as this. And are we to believe that the crustaceans, fishes, reptiles, and mammals, because they have lived and tyrannized in succession on the earth, followed from each other by a law of descent? That the crustaceans produced the fishes; that the fishes gave birth to the reptiles; that the reptiles were developed into the mammals. No-the reptiles are not born of the fishes; the mammals are not sprung from the reptiles; and God forbid that man should be born of an ape. Base, degraded, and cruel as he is, he was once made in the "image of God," and carries with him in his degradation the ineffaceable lineaments of his parentage. If the doctrine of the "pithecoid origin of man" were true, we should expect to find the reign of the mammals culmi Not only did the species of Fishes at their maximum attain from twenty to twenty-five per cent of the coëxistent fossils, but at their maximum of numbers they possessed the maximum of organization and of force. The Placoid and Ganoid fishes, now scarce among us, and represented by the Shark and Sturgeon as their largest types, constituted in the new er Palæozoic period the whole of the dominant race of fishes. The inferior orders of fishes, now so familiar to us, did not come into existence until the rulers of their race had lost their sovereignty, and 1861.] THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH. resigned the government of the world into the hands of more powerful and more intelligent successors. No doubt whatever can exist as to the superiority of the Placoids and Ganoids, as evidenced by their occasional ovo-viviparous reproduction; by their reptilian heterocercal tails, and by the splendid armor of enameled bone in which the Ganoids were cased. Clad in this defensive armor from snout to tail, these mailed monarchs swam at large through the Palæozoic seas, tyrannized over the inferior orders of creation, and asserted for themselves the prerogative of governing the world. One great peculiarity of these fishes is, the remarkable position of the eye. When you catch a mackerel, her ring, or salmon, you will find, upon taking it from the water, that its mild, round eyes look at you with reproach, and seem to say: "Why have you taken me? What have I done? What mischief have I committed?" If you draw a dog-fish from the water, you will find a totally different meaning in his lurid, pale-blue eyes, which are placed in a sinister position, with an ugly and dangerous expression, at the angle of the mouth, as if so placed, to enable him to judge the flavor of a portion of your flesh. Such was the ugly but unmistakably kingly mark of these great monarch fishes. Not only is the degradation of the fishes proved by the high organization they possessed when they ruled the world; but it is confirmed by the special creation of the Pleuronectoids (or flat fishes) immediately previous to the creation of man. This is a fact with which most educated persons are familiar, but which, in relation to the history of life, can not be too frequently insisted upon. Let us examine this sole, condemned to swim upon its side, and to prevent its realizing in this position the Irish definition of a squint, "one eye skimming the pot and the other eye up the chimney," it has been made to undergo a curvature of its spine and a corresponding distortion of the face, so as to bring both eyes to the left or uppermost side to protect him from the numerous enemies surrounding him. No person examining the structure of this sole, and observing its crooked spine and distorted eyes, can regard it as any thing but a testimony from nature; or rather, I should say, from the God of nature, to the fact, that he fashions these creatures according to his will, and endows them with faculties-some higher, some lower; but all according to his good pleasure, and that the arbitrary character of will is not to be taken from him as one of his prerogatives. It was no blind freak of nature that produced, in the first instance, the greatest fishes, and afterward allowed them to deteriorate, as if their Creator had made them and afterward forgot them. I can not believe the cold philosophy that would ascribe this to chance. I believe that he who made them knew what he was about; that he created them for the purpose of illustrating to us, his thinking creatures, the inexhaustible resources of his intelligence, the Almighty power of his will. If the deterioration of the fishes, from the time that they governed the world, to the present day, is remarkable, that of the Mammals is scarcely less so, and it appears to have taken place in a much shorter space of time. In proof of this deterioration, I need only appeal to the diminutive Sloth of South-America, the representative of the gigantic Mylodon, measuring upward of eleven feet in length, which sought and found its leafy food, not like its dwarfed successor, by climbing, but by uprooting trees-and even this gigantesque sloth sinks into insignificance in presence of his cotemporary, the Megatherium, measuring upward of eighteen feet in length, and provided with a muscular cylindrical tongue, capable of licking the branches off the largest trees. In like manner the little Armadillo of South-America, was represented during the reign of the Mammals, by the gigantic Glyptodon, measuring nine feet in length; and the kangaroos of Australia are the degenerate successors of the great Diprotodon, a specimen of the lower jaw of which, lately brought to Dublin by Captain Vigors, belonged to an animal that must have weighed between fifteen hundred pounds and sixteen hundred pounds. Numerous other examples of deterioration in size, ferocity, and numbers, will occur to the geological reader-such as the elephants, rhinoceroses, mastodons, and bears of Europe and America, whose extinction, as is proved by recently discovered remains of man in France and England, was hastened, if not altogether occasioned by the those monarchs, and in all probability banished many of them from the globe; whose reign will be as permanent as the Creator's will who produced him. In the controversy, as to the origin of the human race, that now occupies the naturalist's spare moments, the combatants naturally take one side or the other, according as their sympathies are with reason, intelligence, and thought; or with the objects of sense and nature that surround us — and it would seem that the more important question of the future of the human race is involved in this dispute. If this be so, the question is decided easily and finally against the "pithecoid origin of man," in the mind of every Christian philosopher. It would indeed appear to be the hight of folly and of bad logic, to claim for man a miraculous future, such as the resurrection of his race would be; and, at the same time, to assign him a natural origin, by descent from the humbler races that have ruled the globe before him. arrival on the globe of the last and only | in the image of God," who has dethroned monarch who was to govern, like his Maker, by intelligence, and not by force. It has often struck thoughtful men, among the ancients, why that wonderful faculty of intelligence, which enables us to rule the largest brutes-the elephant, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros of the globewhy that faculty should not reside in the larger animals, but in an unarmed and apparently helpless creature: it is to show us that the faculties and powers which the Creator gives, are not to be measured by size; that those things which appear of little value, such as modesty, humility, gentleness, and intelligence, are, in the sight of Him who knows all things, of greater worth than the more sensible, more brilliant, and more powerful attributes of larger though less gifted creatures. This same lesson is written in the reign of the Mammals, those monarchs that lived before us, and which are now gone and past. It may be a matter of dispute when their reign began, and when it ended; however, it is clear that, sooner or later, Man has superseded them, and it appears to me equally clear that he has dethroned them, because he is not of them, nor descended from them. The Mammals do not culminate in man, for their zoological supremacy is gone. Let not any sciolist presume to tell us, that when Hanno's sailors slew with their bows and arrows, and afterward skinned, the horrible gorillas of the West Coast of Africa, that they mistook them for men, and were guilty of murder-they were no such fools —and it has been reserved for our modern naturalists to regard those ugly brutes as their ancestors. I admit that the go rilla is a larger, stronger, and more ferocious brute than I am, but "give me a little time," as Bishop Butler says, give me time to combine with a few unarmed, ignorant creatures like myself, and I will destroy fifty millions of these brutes. All we require is time; therefore, mere size, mere force, can not govern the world which is now ruled by a creature "made Let those whose minds have been dwarfed by the exclusive study of some minute branch of the great tree of knowledge, defend such paradoxes-we prefer to cast in our lot and faith with the great Hebrew warrior-king, whose theory of the origin of man, suggested by the study of the phenomena of nature, is contained in the words which will last while the world itself endures: "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers; the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor; thou madest him to have doput all things under his feet; all sheep and oxen, main over the works of thy hands; thou hast yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.' O Lord! Our Governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world. From the Dublin University Magazine. A SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE BLACK COUNTRY. THE Black Country, as it is pictur-beings that you find in the great thoesquely and not inaptly termed, is a sight roughfares of London, or a large manufac well worth seeing. Black and grimy turing city. The people are under ground, though it be, cheerless and unlovely as it moiling and toiling, digging and delving, looks, it contains within it more elements blasting and excavating. There they all of material prosperity, a greater amount are, fathoms deep from the sun's light and of mineral wealth, and a more densely po- the glad air of heaven, and not a sound pulated area than any other equally sized ever struggles up to earth to betray their tract of country on the face of the globe. whereabouts. Its entire length, from north to south, is a At night the scene is changed. So soon little more than twenty miles, extending as the shades of evening drop darkling from Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, over down, the country becomes a conflagration. Cannock Chase, to Beverton, near Badge- As far as the eye can reach, volumes of ley, and its breadth is about ten, Walsall lurid flames, issuing from a thousand furand Wolverhampton being its opposite naces, shoot up the empyrean. Long boundaries. In the daylight it is a region lambent tongues of fire strike their pointof illimitable chimney-shafts and innumer-ed tongues into the night, and transform able furnaces, of miles upon miles of dull, it into a monster. For twenty miles dead brick walls, broken by doors and round the horizon glows with fervent windows, in which the miners have their heat; the stars wax pale and lustreless, dwellings, and where they rear, after their and even the silver moon is shorn of half own fashion, their generally large broods her beauty. Earth becomes an inferno, of young. Here and there are sparsely stricken with a terrible beauty-the fir scattered better houses, the residences of mament is a red-hot roof. The very soil the masters and factors, but the bettering is alight with innumerable fiery horrors, consists usually in the size of the building and its every acre sends up to heaven its and its small plot of brownish-green lawn, separate tribuute of lurid glory. A jourand not in any exhibiting of architectural ney by night through this strange region ornamentations or refined taste. Over is a spectacle that can never be forgotten. all these sixty square miles of superfices is It is a type of the nether hell, and the spread an amazing net-work of canals and end of the world seems at hand! railways, all swarming with motion, all instinct with life. Every factory is connected with some main line of locomotives by its little branch and siding, and every mine has either the same or its miniature wharf, at which the long narrow barges lie and load. Notwithstanding the enormous population you know to be at work, there is a strange absence of noise, and bustle, and motion. Here and there you hear the dull, resonant "thud" of the ponderous hammer, the scream of the escaping steam, or the sullen, continuous rumble of the huge three-horse wagon, as it rolls cumbrously over the hard road; but there is none of that torrent-like roar of restless, unrestrainable life; that whirl and clash and comminglement of human They are not a bad race, take them all in all, these miners. Rude and uninformed as they are, they are industrious and honest. Good fathers and husbands are they, after their own uncouth fashion, and very many of them "fear God," while a still larger number "honor the king." Saturday is, to a certain extent, a day of rest, and it is then that they throw aside the pick and shovel, and in the company of their wives, if they have them, betake themselves to the nearest town, to lay in their weekly stores, and enjoy their brief hour of relaxation. It is to this town we propose to transport our readers-the hour being eight o'clock, and the evening cold, but seasonable for the time of the year. |