alls the history of its type, prove that the Creative Thought
in its immediate present action embraces all that has gone before, as
its first organic expression included all that was to come? The study of
Nature in its highest meaning shows us the present doubly rich with all
the past, and the past linked and interwoven with the present, not lying
divorced and dead behind it.

I have spoken of the Silurian beach as if there were but one, not only
because I wished to limit my sketch, and to attempt at least to give
it the vividness of a special locality, but also because a single such
shore will give us as good an idea of the characteristic fauna of the
time as if we drew our material from a wider range. There are, however,
a great number of parallel ridges belonging to the Silurian and Devonian
periods, running from east to west, not only through the State of New
York, but far beyond, through the States of Michigan and Wisconsin into
Minnesota; one may follow nine or ten such successive shores in unbroken
lines, from the neighborhood of Lake Champlain to the Far West. They
have all the irregularities of modern sea-shores, running up to form
little bays here, and jutting out in promontories there; and upon each
one are found animals of the same kind, but differing in species from
those of the preceding.

Although the early geological periods are more legible in North America,
because they are exposed over such extensive tracts of land, yet they
have been studied in many other parts of the globe. In Norway, in
Germany, in France, in Russia, in Siberia, in Kamtchatka, in parts of
South America, in short, wherever the civilization of the white race has
extended, Silurian deposits have been observed, and everywhere they
bear the same testimony to a profuse and varied creation. The earth was
teeming then with life as now, and in whatever corner of its surface the
geologist finds the old strata, they hold a dead fauna as numerous as
that which lives and moves above it. Nor do we find that there was any
gradual increase or decrease of any organic forms at the beginning and
close of the successive periods. On the contrary, the opening scenes of
every chapter in the world's history have been crowded with life, and
its last leaves as full and varied as its first.

I think the impression that the faunae of the early geological periods
were more scanty than those of later times arises partly from the fact
that the present creation