The Meeting-Place of Geology and History

the lower grades of living creatures. Only within a few thousand years does our globe seem to have been fitted for its highest tenant. The evidence of this is to

he mixed and unconsolidated materials of the sun and planets-a void and de

envelope, but tending by degrees to a condition in which it shall have a solid crust, on which the

by the sea. Into the latter the rains falling on the land are carrying sediment derived from the wasting rocks, though the waters are still warm and the thinner parts of the crust are still welling out

n fishes were introduced into the sea, and when the land became covered with dense forests of plants allied to the modern club-mosses,

e places now held by the mammals and the birds; while the continents were covered with a flora distinct alike from that of the previous and succeeding periods, replaced, however, as time went on by forests very like those of the modern world. In th

esent forms. Toward its close and after many vicissitudes of geography and climate, and several successive dynasties of mammalian life, man and the land animals now his contemporaries occupied the world,

with the 'days' of creation. This is not an intentional reconciliation

cessary to consider it more in detail. More particularly we may endeavour to answ

arlier pictures, because in these periods the physical conditions necessary to man and the animals nearest

in which we still live; and in point of fact it is only in superficial deposits of the later part of this las

he arch?an, or eozoic, six for the pal?ozoic, three for the mesozoic, and one for the cenozoic. [4] Of the last, the later part, in which there is a possibility of the existence of man, will be limited to less than a quarter of a million; and within this the certainly known remains of man, whether attributed as by some to the latest inter-glacial p

ter of estimation; but the relative lengths of the different

f years of the earth's history, and the known duration of the human period may be indicated by a thickish line at one e

he latest geological evidence, though this evidence would demand for its full detail a larger space than th

's Manual; Prestwich's Geology; Th

say, ape-like forms. This is admitted; but then we have as yet no good evidence that man was so developed, and no remains of intermediate forms are yet known to science. Even should some animal, either recent or fossil, be discovered intermediate in structure between ma

ecies of marine animals does not exceed three and a half, all the other species found being extinct. The miocene (less recent) includes beds in which the percentage of living species does not exceed thirty-five. The pliocene (more recent) includes beds in which the living forms of marine life exceed thirty-five per cent, but there is still a considerable proportion of extinct species. Newer than this we have the pleistocene (most recent), in which there are scarcely as many extinct species as there are of recent in the eocene. Lastly, the mo

equable climate, insomuch that plants now limited to warm temperate regions could flourish in Greenland. It is further to be observed that regions such as Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, which are known to us historically as among the earliest abodes of man, were at this time under the ocean, as were a

re extensive than at present. It was also a time of great physical change, when much erosion of valleys and sculpturing of the surface of the land occurred, and when extensive earth movements and ejections of igneous rock increased the irregularity of the surface and gave greater variety and beauty to the land. The pliocene was altogether a most important period for giving the finishing

nimal life only toward the south and in a few favoured spots in the higher latitudes. There is much difference of opinion among geologists as to the extent, duration and vicissitudes of this reign of ice, but there can be no doubt that it destroyed much of the animal and vegetable life of the pliocene, or obliged it to migrate to the southward. In this period great deposits of mud, sand and gravel were laid down, which prepared the world for a new departure in the succeeding age. This

the glacial age, in the northern temperate regions at least, there are some facts which have been supposed to indicate a pre-