, and from amidst the fertile slime and
mould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces of
organic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation.
Thousands of years rolled on. The world ocean subsided, the peaks
of mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged,
and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, a
gigantic growth of grass, every blade as large as our vastest oak,
shot from the soil, and the incalculable epoch of ferns commenced,
whose tremendous harvest clothed the whole land with a deep carpet
of living verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetation
were successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the dark
layers of inexhaustible coal beds, the world, one waving
wilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless and
silent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all its
magnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavily
surcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerable
ages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching its
limit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, the
earliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugs
of the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during which
animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by
plesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feet
in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight
loaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea,
the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the
nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, when
millions of aons had worn away, the creative process culminated in
Humanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let us
make man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with upright
form, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on the
summit of the world and gave names to all the races of creatures
beneath.1

At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whether
man is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan for
this world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to be
superseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, and
attributes transcending our conceptions, even as our own
transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence.
Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and
making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatur