the wonderful period in which he lived, and
which brought to the surface all its greatest elements,--one among a
throng of exceptional men, generals, soldiers, statesmen, as well as
men of commanding intellect in literary and scientific pursuits,--seems
always standing at the meeting-point between the past and present. His
gaze is ever fixed upon the path along which Creation has moved, and, as
he travels back, recovering step by step the road that has been lost to
man in apparently impenetrable darkness and mystery, the light brightens
and broadens before him, and seems to tempt him on into the dim regions
where the great mystery of Creation lies hidden.

Before the year 1800, men had never suspected that their home had been
tenanted in past times by a set of beings totally different from those
that inhabit it now; still farther was it from their thought to imagine
that creation after creation had followed each other in successive ages,
every one stamped with a character peculiarly its own. It was Cuvier
who, aroused to new labors by the hint he received from the bones
unearthed at Montmartre, to which all his vast knowledge of living
animals gave him no clue, established by means of most laborious
investigations the astounding conclusion, that, prior to the existence
of the animals and plants now living, this globe had been the theatre of
another set of beings, every trace of whom had vanished from the face of
the earth. To his alert and active intellect and powerful imagination a
word spoken out of the past was pregnant with meaning; and when he had
once convinced himself that he had found a single animal that had no
counterpart among living beings, it gave him the key to many mysteries.

It may be doubted whether men's eyes are ever opened to truths which,
though new to them, are old to God, till the time has come when they
can apprehend their meaning and turn them to good account. It certainly
seems, that, when such a revelation has once been made, light pours in
upon it from every side; and this is especially true of the case in
point. The existence of a past creation once suggested, confirmation
was found in a thousand facts overlooked before. The solid crust of the
earth gave up its dead, and from the snows of Siberia, from the soil of
Italy, from caves of Central Europe, from mines, from the rent sides of
mountains and from their highest peaks, from the coral beds of ancient
oceans, the varied animals that had