in the form of life may have appeared. Perhaps vast masses of
dank seaweed germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming
oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its
rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath
the next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form
the record of its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds
in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in vast beds of
decaying vegetation that form the coal-fields of to-day.

Animal life began first, like the plants, in the bosom of the ocean.
From the slimy depths of the water life crawled hideous to the land.
Great reptiles dragged their sluggish length through the tangled
vegetation of the jungle of giant ferns.

Through countless thousands of years, perhaps, this gradual process
went on. Nature, shifting its huge scenery, depressed the ocean beds
and piled up the dry land of the continents. In place of the vast
'Continental Sea,' which once filled the interior of North America,
there arose the great plateau or elevated plain that now runs from the
Mackenzie basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of the rushing waters of
the inland sea, these waters have narrowed into great rivers--the
Mackenzie, the Saskatchewan, the Mississippi--that swept the face of
the plateau and wore down the surface of the rock and mountain slopes
to spread their powdered fragments on the broad level soil of the
prairies of the west. With each stage in the evolution of the land the
forms of life appear to have reached a higher development. In place of
the seaweed and the giant ferns of the dawn of time there arose the
maples, the beeches, and other waving trees that we now see in the
Canadian woods. The huge reptiles in the jungle of the Carboniferous
era passed out of existence. In place of them came the birds, the
mammals,--the varied types of animal life which we now know. Last in
the scale of time and highest in point of evolution, there appeared man.

We must not speak of the continents as having been made once and for
all in their present form. No doubt in the countless centuries of
geological evolution various parts of the earth were alternately raised
and depressed. Great forests grew, and by some convulsion were buried
beneath the ocean, covered deep as they lay there with a sediment of
earth and rock, and at length raised again as the waters retreated. The
coal-beds of Cape Breto