ian or Assyrian stone; they hold with
reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced
characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the
announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central
America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and
temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep
wonder.

To me it seems, that to look on the first land that was ever lifted
above the waste of waters, to follow the shore where the earliest
animals and plants were created when the thought of God first
expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one's hand a bit of
stone from an old sea-beach, hardened into rock thousands of
centuries ago, and studded with the beings that once crept upon its
surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave, is even of
deeper interest to men than the relies of their own race, for these
things tell more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God.

Standing in the neighborhood of Whitehall, near Lake George, one may
look along such a seashore, and see it stretching westward and sloping
gently southward as far as the eye can reach. It must have had a very
gradual slope, and the waters must have been very shallow; for at that
time no great mountains had been uplifted, and deep oceans are always
the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this
by inference merely; we have an evidence of the shallowness of the sea
in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian
deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters.

Indeed, the fossil remains of all times tell us almost as much of the
physical condition of the world at different epochs as they do of its
animal and vegetable population. When Robinson Crusoe first caught
sight of the footprint on the sand, he saw in it more than the mere
footprint, for it spoke to him of the presence of men on his desert
island. We walk on the old geological shores, like Crusoe along his
beach, and the footprints we find there tell us, too, more than we
actually see in them. The crust of our earth is a great cemetery,
where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written
their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and
where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they
lived. We ascertain the prevalence of certain physical conditions at
special epochs by the presence of animals