confirmed and greatly expanded by the researches of Lamarck in fossil Chonchology, of Adolphe Brongniart in fossil Botany, and of Agassiz, in fossil Ichthyology; and, more recently, by the labors and splendid illustrations of Buckland, Sedgewick, Mantell, De la Beche, Murchison, Lyell, Owen, and others, until the study has at length reached the dignity of a science. It is called Paleontology, or the science of Organic Remains. "Pushing research to its limits," says one of the American cultiva tors of this great field of study, "we seem nearly to have reached the bounds of the accessible past, in the diminution, and at last the total disappearance of fossils in the earlier strata. Our science has reached the point just attained by geography. No conjectural continent is left for a geological Columbus to discover no great region remains unvisited, and no principal boundary undrawn. The business of the present and future generations of geologists, is to establish with all the precision admissible, by science, the exact limits which divide the many districts of ancient time into which they have penetrated; to define the position, so to speak, of each known coast, and to bring to light such lesser districts as may yet lie undiscovered within their more conspicuous borders." 5

The latest work that has reached our notice, presenting the embodied results of these investigations and discoveries, is the one whose title we have prefixed to this article. Although adding little to the stock of materials previously furnished to us, it is, in every respect, a most admirable volume, and one which few can read without interest and profit. It is simple and natural in arrangement, clear and graphic in its style, and at the same time cautious and philosophical in its generalizations and conclusions. Though dealing with the department of natural history lying farthest from direct observation, and teeming

ic life disappeared, and new forms of animal and vegetable being welcomed the dawn of a better cycle. Thus did the great magician of the charnal house survey from his pyramid of bones, the successive ages of life and death; thus did he conjure up the spoils of pre-existing worlds, the noblest offering which man ever laid upon the altar of its SOVEREIGN."-Edinburgh Review, Vol. lxv. p. 12.

5H. D. Rogers' Address before American Geologists and Naturalists, p. 16.

with the greatest wonders, and which the uninitiated are disposed to regard as entirely fabulous, the author, true to the spirit of his noble science, never allows his imagination to out-travel and distort the decision of his judgment, guided by the strictest laws of induction; and while he is truly successful in essaying to give " Picturesque Sketches of Creation," he has drawn no pictures the distinct monographs of which had not been furnished to his hands in the disentombed relics of former ages. But it is not our present purpose to review this book; and in fulfilling the object before us, in presenting our readers with as full a statement of the results of paleontological research as our prescribed limits will permit, we shall draw but little from its well-filled pages. In giving this statement, we shall strictly confine ourselves to the presentation of facts and conclusions which have been admitted into the pale of science, letting the savans of fossil geology speak for themselves, though taking the liberty to employ our own language, as little burdened with the technicalities of the science as possible. The relations of these disclosures to the principles of religious truth, especially as they bear upon the Scripture doctrine of creation, must be deferred to another time.

Of the amount of organic life that has prevailed on the earth, we may form some conception from the number and thickness of the strata which are found to contain its relics or impressions. The precise number of the fossiliferous strata, that is, of strata containing the remains of organic existence, is not satisfactorially determined; but it is so great, amounting, at least, to several hundreds, that it has been found convenient to arrange them into classes or groups, generally called formations, in order to render their explanation simple and intelligible. The most important of these groups, expressive of as many periods in the history of the earth, may be represented by the following:

Tabular view of the Fossiliferous Strata.

Alluvium, or Modern.

Diluvium or Drift.

Plioce.

TERTIARY. Miocene.

Eocene.

The lowermost or oldest grand division, including the Cambrian and Silurian deposits, resting on Primary or Non-fossiliferous rocks, embraces those strata which bear marks of having been formed while the earth was undergoing a transition from an inhabitable to a habitable state, and covers the first great period of organic life on the globe; while the Secondary and Tertiary series, as their names imply, indicate the second and third great periods of vegetable and animal existence in past time. Each of these strata, it must be remembered, was once the uppermost, constituting the earth's surface, and covered, to some extent, with living and moving forms, which not only had their birth, but their entombment, for the most part, at least, in the same quiet manner as is the order of nature at present; as appears from the orderly and preserved state in which their remains are now found; and when it is considered, that these strata are proved to have an aggregate thickness of more than thirty five thousand feet, or upwards of six miles, we are overwhelmed with astonishment and wonder at a view of the amount of organic existence with which the face of our planet has been successively clothed and peopled, and of the length of the period which must have elapsed during this long series of creations and destructions, of growth and decay.

Our wonder is scarcely less, when we consider what has been really ascertained in regard to the comparative number of living and extinct species. According to the best authorities, there have now been discovered the remains of something like ten thousand distinct species of vegetable

6 The names which we have employed to indicate the three grand di visions of Geological time, particularly that of Transition, are gradually going out of use among geologists, and in their place are substituted terms of a Greek origin,-Palazoic, Mesozoic, and Canozoic, signifying the first, second, and third great periods of organic life on the globe.

and animal existence in a fossil state; not more than six or seven hundred of which have any representatives in the living creation. Far more than ten times the number of ascertained fossil species began and ended their career, before the existing races, with man at their head, appeared on the stage; and when we reflect, that what has been discovered in this field is but an approximation to the truth, and that each of the ten thousand ascertained species has had its legions of individuals as its representatives; and also, what is acknowledged by every paleontologist, that, in the lower or more ancient formations, the proportion of individuals to the species was vastly greater than in more recent organisms, we are led to perceive that the orb which we inhabit has been covered by a succession and an amount of organic and sentient existence, of which all that has existed on its face and been gathered to its bosom, since the creation of our own species, can give us but a faint and meagre conception.

In giving a sketch of the present state of knowledge respecting these pre-existing forms of animated nature, we begin with the vestiges of the vegetable kingdom. The remains of vegetable forms are detected in a great variety of conditions sometimes as peet-wood and submerged forests, sometimes in calcarious and silecious petrifactions, sometimes in the form of coal and lignite, and sometimes in the impressions of leaves, stems and fruits in beds of rocks, which once constituted the soil in which the trees or plants grew. Many valuable minerals, found at different depths in the earth, are also traced to a vegetable origin. The amber which is dug from the clay beds in the eastern part of England, and brought so plentifully from the shores. of the Baltic, is, with hardly a doubt, a fossil resin, being the preserved secretion of coniferous trees, such as pines and firs, which grew in former ages on or near those localities. The diamond, which is pure charcoal, in the language of Dr. Mantell, " is probably a vegetable secretion, that has acquired a crystalline structure from electrochemical action." The traces of vegetable productions have been discovered in all the groups of the fossiliferous strata, except perhaps in the lowest or Cambrian; for though the vestiges of between twenty and thirty species of the lower orders of animal life, such as shells, corals

and zoophites, have been detected in this series of rocks, no distinct relics of vegetable forms have yet been discov ered in them. It would be rash, however, to conclude that no plants existed at that early period, for not only is their existence acknowledged to be essential to the support of animal life, in all its forms, but they may have existed at the time without transmitting their relics to our times, as their forms are more volatile and perishable than those of animals. The first distinct traces of them are met with in the Silurian group, and they are plentifully scattered through all the subsequent formations. The number of known species of fossil plants is very nearly a thousand. Although this probably affords an insight into but a very small portion of the variety and extent of the vegetation that has successively flourished on the globe, it has given a clue to some generalizations of a most interesting character, as furnishing a key to an explanation of the ancient Floras of the earth. From the data here offered, Brongnairt, Lindley, and other eminent fossil botanists have considered themselves qualified to divide the history of the ancient vegetation into three great periods or epochs, each marked by somewhat peculiar forms.

The first begins with the earliest signs of vegetative matter in the lower fossiliferous strata, and extends to the top of the Carboniferous group. The plants of this period were chiefly remarkable for the simplicity of their structure, and at the same time for the general greatness of their size. The first vegetable forms that seem to have appeared to enliven the face of nature, and to serve as tubes of communication and support from the mineral to the animal kingdom, were marine plants, called algæ, fuci, or sea weeds, such as now grow at the bottom of deep seas in hot climates. This was the character of the vegetation through the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone periods, no traces of terrestrial or land vegetation having been detected in their deposits. But in the early part of the Carboniferous era, "the dry land" began to "appear" above the surface of a hitherto apparently shoreless ocean; and it seems not to have been long before it was covered with a most luxuriant vegetation. That our anthricitic and bituminous coal is the mineralized vegetable product of that period, is no longer doubted by geologists. Not only have the entire