became visible from
the earth's surface.

The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic
record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to
account for,--the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and
creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is
called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains
of these three great periods, and of these only. And the question once
fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in
holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into _three_
great parts. There are many lesser divisions,--divisions into systems,
formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of
which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the
unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three,--the
Palaeozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the Secondary, or middle
fossiliferous division; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous
division.

In the first, or Palaeozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans,
molluscs, fishes, and, in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none
of these classes of organisms give its leading character to the
Palaeozoic; they do not constitute its prominent feature, or render it
more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which
followed. That which chiefly distinguished the Palaeozoic from the
Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was
emphatically the period of plants,--"of herbs yielding seed after their
kind." In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the
youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,--a youth
of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of
the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria,
and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or
running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its
ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of
Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and
luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming
soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the
enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary
age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the
flames that roar in our chimneys w