ntless forests that must have grown up, flourished, died, and
decayed, to fill the storehouses of coal that feed the fires of the
human race to-day,--if we consider all these records of the past, the
intellect fails to grasp a chronology for which our experience furnishes
no data, and the time that lies behind us seems as much an eternity to
our conception as the future that stretches indefinitely before us.

The physical as well as the human history of the world has its mythical
age, lying dim and vague in the morning mists of creation, like that of
the heroes and demigods in the early traditions of man, defying all
our ordinary dates and measures. But if the succession of periods that
prepared the earth for the coming of man, and the animals and plants
that accompany him on earth, baffles our finite attempts to estimate its
duration, have we any means of determining even approximately the length
of the period to which we ourselves belong? If so, it may furnish us
with some data for the further solution of these wonderful mysteries of
time, and it is besides of especial importance with reference to the
question of permanence of Species. Those who maintain the mutability of
Species, and account for all the variety of life on earth by the gradual
changes wrought by time and circumstances, do not accept historical
evidence as affecting the question at all. The monuments of those oldest
nations, all whose history is preserved in monumental records, do not
indicate the slightest variation of organic types from that day to this.
The animals that were preserved within their tombs or carved upon their
walls by the ancient Egyptians were the same as those that have their
home in the valley of the Nile today; the negro, whose peculiar features
are unmistakable even in their rude artistic attempts to represent them,
was the same woolly-haired, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, dark-skinned being
in the days of the Rameses that he is now. The Apis, the Ibis, the
Crocodiles, the sacred Beetles, have brought down to us unchanged all
the characters that superstition hallowed in those early days. The
stony face of the Sphinx is not more true to its past, nor the massive
architecture of the Pyramids more unchanged, than they are. But the
advocates of the mutability of Species say truly enough that the most
ancient traditions are but as yesterday in the world's history, and that
what six thousand years could not do sixty thousand years might effe