st of the consecutive creations,--and to a
species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has
not yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violence
and suffering in the old immature stages of being,--much, from the era
of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of
bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken
remains of its own kind in its bowels,--much, again, from the times of
the crocodile of the Oolite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and
gigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly
improved in that latest-born creation in the series, that recognizes as
its delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker.
But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shall
re-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellow-men, and in which there
shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose to
record,--"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."
Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that
the present scene of being "is surely not the last,"--a truth
corroborated since his day by the analogies of a new science,--

"The poor, oppressed, honest man,
Had never sure been born,
Had not there been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn."

It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a hypochondriac wrapped up in
his night-clothes,--gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds
of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central
hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer
slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that
frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain
pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and
precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight
shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few
hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view,
partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,--a deserted boat
harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy
bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising
over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land
with which man had done for ever;--the vapor-enveloped rocks,--the waste
of ebb-uncovered sand,--the deserted harbor,--th