ocean is the symbol of a divine idea-the swelling prairie, the rocky cordillera, the teeming populations of land, and sea, and air, are the utterances of divine conceptions-the stirring leaf, the basking butterfly, the glistening pebble on the strand, are thoughts of the Infinite, crystallized in visible things, thrown down before us to arrest our attention-strewn over our pathway to provoke our curiosity and arouse the powers of the soul.

We have listened to the recital of the pebble, and its simple story has turned our thoughts backward over the flight of ages, and disclosed a marvelous unity running through the long series of revolutions and innovations to which our domestic planet has been subjected. We have read the epic of the trilobite, and have learned of a Deity inaugurating plans in the infancy of our earth which are still in process of consummation. We have lighted the vistas of the fleeting ages. We have studied the records of universal empires, and the monuments which perpetuate the memory of powerful dynasties. We have seen the procession of living forms pass by, and discovered them marshaled by a single leading Intelligence. We have witnessed the progressive development of the physical world -its successive adaptations to its successive populations, and its completion and special preparation for the occupancy of man, and have learned that the whole creation is the product of one eternal, intelligent master purposethe coherent result of ONE MIND.

What higher subject of contemplation than the worldphenomena which express the thoughts of the Creator? What nobler history to study than the annals of races and revolutions in which the Almighty purpose, instead of human will, has been the controlling power? What antiquities more awe-inspiring than the ruins of continents and the tombs of races whose splendid dynasties passed their

meridian and decline while yet the family of Adam was in the unborn future, and God, in the awful solitudes of earth, worked out his all-embracing plans? From the elevated stand-point of modern science, the view before us is inspiring. Let us thread a few of the footpaths leading up to this enchanting altitude.

10 / (?)

WE

CHAPTER II.

THE ORDEAL BY WATER.

E were too hasty in pronouncing it impossible that the little shell struck from the gorge-wall of the roaring stream could ever have belonged to a living animal. It is quite true that no being now exists in the waters of the land or the ocean which can be exactly identified with it. There are forms in the sea, however, which possess every characteristic by which we distinguished it from the river mussel. The resemblances are so close that we are compelled to admit that this may really be a marine form. We look again at the pile of rocks from which this specimen was taken. Layer after layer succeeds from the bottom to the top; and here and there are other similar forms imbedded between the sheets of shale. If these are marine forms, these strata are marine sediments. But here is the difficulty. This place is hundreds of feet above the surface of the sea, and if ever the sea stood at this level the greater part of the continent must have been submerged. But have we not a record of such a submergence? Yes, indeed; the sacred writers tell us of a deluge which destroyed the human family. A tradition of the same has been embalmed in Ovid's myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and nearly every nation under the sun, from the cultured Greek to the savage Koloschian of Alaska, has its legend under which the memory of the Deluge has been perpetuated. Shall we then content ourselves with the conclusion that this pile of strata was laid down by the waters of the Noachian flood, and that these molluscs were

the contemporaries of the beasts which inhabited the ark? A conclusion thus hastily reached would have suited the preceding age; but the spirit of modern research bids us examine farther. We lay down our little shell, and set out upon the search for evidences to confirm the suspicions already awakened, that it was once the home of a seadwelling mollusc.

Go with me first to the coast of the Gulf of Naples. There, near the ancient town of Puzzuoli, at the head of an indentation in the Bay of Balæ, stand three marble pillars forty feet in height. Their pedestals are washed by the waters of the Mediterranean. The marble pavement upon which they stand, and which was, in the second century, the floor of a temple, or, perhaps, of a bath-house, is sunken three feet beneath the waves. Six feet beneath this is another costly pavement of mosaic, which must have formed the original floor of the temple. What does all this indicate? The foundations of a temple would not be laid nine feet beneath the level of the sea. They must have been built upon the solid land. As the land subsided a new foundation was laid, and a new structure was reared above the encroaching waves. But look upward and examine the surface of the marble. For twelve. feet above their pedestals these pillars are smooth and uninjured. Above this is a zone of about nine feet, throughout which the marble is perforated with numerous holes. Exploring these holes, we find them to enlarge inward, and at the bottom of each repose the remains of a little boring bivalve shellLithodomus. This little bivalve is the same species which is now inhabiting the adjacent waters. We know well its habits. It does not live in the open water. It burrows in the sand, or bores its way into the shells of other molluscs, or into solid stone. But it never climbs trees or marble columns to build its nest, like a bird in the air. How, then,