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
relics 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 sea-shore, 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 and plants whose existence and maintenance required
such a state of things, more than by any positive knowledge respecting
it. Where we find