to animal life; an
atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living
thing could breathe and continue to live. Hence it was, that
vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface.
Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew
tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to
presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky. These stupendous
forests stood alone upon the surface of the earth; no animals wandered
through their fastnesses; no birds sported amidst their mighty
branches; noxious exhalations came steaming up from their tangled
recesses, and their gloomy shadows lay a mantle of darkness over
dreary and lifeless solitudes. The storms raged, and the winds howled;
the sun travelled its daily rounds, with its light dimmed and clouded
by the pestilential vapors it exhaled, and silence, so far as the
sounds of animal life were concerned, reigned supreme--the stillness
of the grave, the quiet of utter desolation, save the voice of the
wind or the storm, was unbroken all over the face of the earth.
Onward, and onward, rolled this mighty orb on its pathway through the
heavens, bearing with it no animal existences, freighted with no human
hopes--carrying with it nothing of human destiny. Man, with all his
lofty aspirations, his mighty schemes, his glory, and his pride, was a
thing of the future. He had not yet emerged from the eternity of the
past, to grapple with the present, or encounter the retributions of
the eternity which is to come. This was the era of gigantic vegetable
growth, and it had its uses; for it was preparing the way for higher
and more complicated existences. As the gases that surrounded the
earth became consolidated into vegetation, as this stupendous growth
decomposed the noxious atmosphere, drawing from it its grosser
particles and working them up into solid matter, extracting from it
what was fatal to animal life, this earth entered upon another era of
its progress.

"Animal life made its appearance. It was weak and feeble at first, but
a step removed from vegetable matter. The molusca, the polypi, and the
rudest forms of fishes, were, beyond question, the first of living
things. Science demonstrates that the water brought forth the first
creations endowed with animal vitality. How long this era continued no
man can tell. Then came the amphibise, gigantic animals of the lizard
kind; the sauruses, that could reach with the