ATR. XIX.

The Archeology of the Earth and its Inhabitants.

By D.

The Ancient World; or Picturesque Sketches of Creation. T. Ansted, M. A., F. R. S., F. G. S.; Professor of Geology in King's College, London, &c. &c. London: John Van Voorst, Paternoster Row, 1847. 8vo. pp. 408.

To a rational and moral inhabitant of our planet, desirous of finding his true place in the scale of being, and of comprehending his relations to the universe, few inqúiries can be more natural or of greater interest than the one indicated by the title of this volume, and which has frequently presented itself to the mind of man before it became an object of scientific research; "What forms of organic existence preceded me on the globe? The stream of life, which now animates and beautifies the face of nature has it forever flowed in a circle, without having had a beginning, and with no increase in its volume or force? or did it have its rise, first in little rivulets, at the bidding of an unseen Power, and afterwards receives fresh and repeated augmentations from the same Source, until it has reached its present state? And if it be true that the representatives of my own race have not existed eternally, and that the earth, previously to their introduction, was not an uninhabited solitude, what were the characteristics of the vegetable and animal structures which flourished on its bosom, from the time of its creation up to the period when my own species made their appearance

In preceding ages, this inquiry has been made with little hope of ever obtaining a satisfactory answer; an impervious veil hung over the past history of the earth, shrouding from human cognizance every monument of creative power anterior to the dawn of human experience. Tradition and history, indeed, as well as revelation, have rendered their verdict in favor of the conclusion, that the race of man has been in existence only a few thousand

years; but, until since the commencement of the present century, he has been furnished with no materials from which to form an enlightened opinion respecting the nature and history of the organizations that preceded him on the globe. These materials have been furnished by the researches of Geology. So great has been the success of this science, within the last half century, in numbering the strata composing the crust of the earth, and in detecting and classifying the organic structures which have been found therein entombed, from the most recent to the most ancient containing fossils, that it has finally reached a degree of perfection when it boldly pronounces itself competent to restore the principal features in its past history, and to give at least a correct outline of the different forms of vegetable and animal life that have successively clothed and adorned its surface. These are disclosures, it must be acknowledged, which invest this branch of science with an interest not to be found in astronomy itself; for, though the latter has opened to our wondering view innumerable and ponderous bodies of matter revolving in the depths of space, it has not been able to prove them to be covered with organized and sentient products of divine power; while Geology has succeeded in demonstrating the earth to have been the theatre of life and animation thousands of years before man was permitted to tread its soil, and in detecting the character of the laws which presided over the organization and destiny of his predecessors on this mundane stage. "If it had been predicted a century ago," says Bakewell, “that a volume would be discovered containing the natural history of the earliest inhabitants of the globe, who flourished and perished before the creation of man, with distinct impressions of the forms of genera of animals no longer existing on the earth,- what curiosity would have been excited to see this wonderful volume! how anxiously would philosophers have waited for the discovery! But this volume is now discovered; it is the volume of Nature, rich with the spoils of primeval ages, unfolded to the view of the attentive observer, in the strata that compose the crust of the globe."!

Fossil organic remains, or the petrified forms of vegeta

1 Introduction to Geology, p. 18.

ble and animal bodies, have received the attention and excited the curiosity of philosophers, to a considerable degree, in nearly every preceding age. Zenophanes, who wrote something like five centuries before the Christian era, was struck with the sight of large quantities of petrified shells on high mountains and in deep places of the earth; he also affirmed the existence of the impressions of fish in the quarries of Syracuse and in a rock at Paros; from which facts he concluded, not only wisely, that these places were once covered by the sea, but rashly, that the earth has existed forever. Herodotus, about a century later, speaks of shells being found in the mountains of Egypt, and concludes, from this circumstance and the saltish emanations that injured the pyramids, that the sea had slowly retired from those places.2 Two hundred years later, Erosthenes made very nearly the same observations in regard to shells; and his observations were not long afterwards repeated by Strabo and Zanthus of Lydia. Fossils engaged the attention of Epicurus; but instead of regarding them as relics of once living bodies, he appears to have ascribed their origin, as he did that of the entire universe, to a fortunate but undesigned concourse and concretion of small particles of matter. Pliny, who wrote during the first century of the Christian era, went so far in the study of petrified shells as to give names to several species which have descended to our times. During the Middle Ages, but little was done in this department of study. In the thirteenth century, much curiosity was excited at the discovery of a branch of a tree on which was a bird's nest containing birds, all turned to stone; but these wonders were accounted for by the disciples of Aristotle without supposing them to have been ever in a living state, conceiving them to have been produced by equivocal generation, or the plastic powers af nature. But it was not till the sixteenth century, that the subject began to command any considerable interest and discussion. rebuilding the citadel of St. Felix, at Verona, it was discovered that the rock on which it was based was full of petrified shells. It was contended by Fracastoro and one or two others of that period, that these and other fossil

2 Book ii., Section 12.

In

bodies had all belonged to living creatures, which had formerly moved and multiplied where their remains are now found; while the majority of those who gave them their attention were content to regard them as "the sports of nature." In the following century, cabinets and catalogues of fossils began to be formed; though little real progress was made towards a consistent explanation of their origin. While many still regarded them as "the sports of nature," some ascribed their origin to "a power latent in the earth," some to the seeds of fishes and shells, which had vegetated and grown in a productive soil; and in considering the fossil bones of Elephants, some, calling themselves profound philosophers, gravely argued that they had been produced by "the tumultuous movements of ter restrial exhalations!" while others, with equal gravity and wisdom, concluded that they were the bones of the fallen angels! There was an increasing number, however, who maintained that all petrified substances were the remains of bodies that had formerly lived either in the water or on the land; but the greater part of those who adopted this opinion, argued, for a long time, that they had all been deposited in the places where they now occur by the deluge of Noah, conceiving it impossible that the earth should have been inhabited by living beings any length of time prior to the creation of man. During the eighteenth century, this was the great subject of dispute between the students of geological changes and organic remains; some referring the deposition of all rocks containing fossils to the action of the deluge; others maintaining that the accredited influence of that event is insufficient to account for the facts in the case, inasmuch as the greater part of disentombed fossils bear evidence of having been deposited in a tranquil state of the elements, and as the remains of some animals had been discovered whose genera and species had long been extinct, and which must therefore have existed ages before the creation of the human race.

It was reserved for Cuvier, in the commencement of the present century, to reduce this difficult branch of study from a state of chaos to one of order and beauty. The wand of his power, through whose magic influence he called back to life, as it were, the dead of former ages, was his skill in comparative anatomy. After acquiring a

familiar acquaintance with the structure and habits of the existing races of animals, and applying this knowledge to the investigation of fossil bodies, he was able, from the examination of a single bone, or even the fragment of a bone, to reconstruct the whole animal to which it had belonged, so as to describe its form, size, habits, and the kind of food on which it had subsisted. In this manner he succeeded in restoring and describing upwards of a hundred and fifty distinct species of quadrupeds, whose bones had been found in the neighborhood of Paris; nearly one third of which he determined to have belonged to extinct races, that is, species which existed and perished before the introduction of the existing tribes.3 In fact, he soon brought himself to the conclusion, from the most rigid induction, that the number of extinct species is far greater than the living ones; that the difference in structure between living animals and those found in a fossil state increases with the age of the deposits or strata containing organic remains; and that this difference establishes the reality and relative age of the several deposits or strata themselves, from the uppermost to the lowermost exhibiting traces of organic life. Finding no vestiges of plants or animals in the rocks called "primitive" or "primary," he at once inferred that there was a period, far back in the history of the earth, when it was a mere mineral mass, untenanted by a living form, and that between that remote period and the creation of our own species, several quite different and distinct orders or systems of organic life, each covering immense periods of time, successively flourished and perished upon its surface.4

These conclusions, at nearly the same time, were

3 Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, p. 66.

4 An eloquent English writer thus speaks of the labors of this Newton of Natural History: "While our geologists were working in chains, [in consequence of their narrow views of the Mosaic chronology and deluge the unfettered genius of CUVIER was ranging over the primeval ages, when the primary rocks rose in insulated grandeur from the deep, and when the elements of life had not yet received their DIVINE COMMISSION. From the age of solitude he passed to the busy age of life; when plants first decked the plains, when the majestic pine threw its picturesque shadows over the earth, and the tragic sounds of carnivorous life rung among her forests. But these plains were again to be desolated, and these sounds again to be hushed. The glories of organ25

VOL. IV.