count of
creation could be rendered more essentially true, than we actually find
it, to the history of creation geologically ascertained. If, taking the
Mosaic days as equivalent to lengthened periods, we hold that, in giving
their brief history, the inspired writer seized on but those salient
points that, like the two great lights of the day and night, would have
arrested most powerfully, during these periods, a human eye, we shall
find the harmony of the two records complete. In your visit to the
museum, I would yet further ask you to mark the place of the human
skeleton in the great gallery. It stands--at least it stood only a few
years ago--in the same apartment with the huge mammifers. And it is
surely worthy of remark, that while in both the sacred and geologic
records a strongly defined line separates between the period of plants
and the succeeding periods of reptiles, and again between the period of
reptiles and the succeeding period of mammals, no line in either record
separates between this period of mammals and the human period. Man came
into being as the lastborn of creation, just ere the close of that sixth
day--the third and terminal period of organic creation--to which the
great mammals belong. Let me yet further remark, that in each of these
three great periods we find, with respect to the classes of existences,
vegetable or animal, by which they were most prominently characterized,
certain well marked culminating points together, if I may so express
myself,--twilight periods of morning dawn and evening decline. The
plants of the earlier and terminal systems of the Palaeozoic division are
few and small: it was only during the protracted _eons_ of the
Carboniferous period that they received their amazing development,
unequalled in any previous or succeeding time.[16] In like manner, in
the earlier or Triassic deposits of the Secondary division, the
reptilian remains are comparatively inconsiderable; and they are almost
equally so in its Cretaceous or later deposits. It was during those
middle ages of the division, represented by its Liassic, Oolitic, and
Wealden formations, that the class existed in that abundance which
rendered it so peculiarly, above every other age, an age of creeping
things and great sea monsters. And so also, in the Tertiary, regarded
as but an early portion of the human division, there was a period of
increase and diminution,--a morning and evening of mammalian life. The
mammals of i