nimal that breeds so slowly as the
elephant could have extended itself over an area so vast.

[Illustration: Fig. 89.

NORWEGIAN SPRUCE.

(Abies excelsa.)]

Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, especially of its
molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I have said, to live in their
descendants. Of even a still more ancient period, represented by the Red
Crag, seventy out of every hundred species of shells still exist; and of
an older period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive
sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, we find the
first known ancestors of our common edible periwinkle and common edible
mussel; and in the Coraline Crag, the first known ancestors of the
common horse-mussel, the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great
pecten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of Britain,
which, however, in other parts of Europe we find so filled up as to
render it evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of
existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the
times represented by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary
division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and
that no chasm or hiatus--no age of general chaos, darkness, and
death--has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the
course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that
immediately before the appearance of man upon earth, there existed a
chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation.
Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, there was no
such chaotic period, in at least what is now Britain and the European
continent: the persistency from a high antiquity of some of the existing
races, of not only plants and shells, but of even some of the
mammiferous animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat,
prove there was not; and any scheme of reconciliation which takes such a
period for granted must be deemed as unsuited to the present state of
geologic knowledge, as any scheme would have been forty years ago which
took it for granted that the writings of Moses _do_ "fix the antiquity
of the globe."

The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr. Pye Smith, though,
save in one particular, identical, as I have said, with that of Dr.
Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its single point of difference, to steer
clear of the difficulty. Both schemes ex