isting type. And yet, though _eons_ of the past eternity have elapsed
since we looked out upon Cycas and Zamia, and the last of the Calamites,
the time is still early, and long ages must lapse ere man shall arise
out of the dust, to keep and to dress fields waving with the productions
of yet another and different flora, and to busy himself with all the
labor which he taketh under the sun. Our country, in this Tertiary time,
has still its great outbursts of molten matter, that bury in fiery
deluges many feet in depth, and many square miles in extent, the debris
of wide tracts of woodland and marsh; and the basaltic columns still
form in its great lava bed; and ever and anon, as the volcanic agencies
awake, clouds of ashes darken the heavens, and cover up the landscape as
if with accumulated drifts of a protracted snow storm. Who shall
declare what, throughout those long ages, the history of creation has
been? We see at wide intervals the mere fragments of successive floras;
but know not how what seem the blank interspaces were filled, or how, as
extinction overtook in succession one tribe of existences after another,
and species, like individuals, yielded to the great law of death, yet
other species were brought to the birth, and ushered upon the scene, and
the chain of being was maintained unbroken. We see only detached bits of
that green web which has covered our earth ever since the dry land first
appeared; but the web itself seems to have been continuous throughout
all time; though ever as breadth after breadth issued from the creative
loom, the pattern has altered, and the sculpturesque and graceful forms
that illustrated its first beginnings and its middle spaces have yielded
to flowers of richer color and blow, and fruits of fairer shade and
outline; and for gigantic club mosses stretching forth their hirsute
arms, goodly trees of the Lord have expanded their great boughs; and for
the barren fern and the calamite, clustering in thickets beside the
waters, or spreading on flowerless hill slopes, luxuriant orchards have
yielded their ruddy flush, and rich harvests their golden gleam.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Prayer will be found at the end of these Memorials.

[2] The same revolver proved to be the instrument of death to another
person, two days after. The circumstances are thus related in the
_Edinburgh Witness_ of December 27:--

"A most melancholy event, arising out of the following circumstances,
oc