When such mighty agencies were in operation, it is not unreasonable to suppose that great changes took place in the way of partial extinction of animal life, and the substitution of new forms to fill up the apparent gap left by the perishing creatures. The contents of the upper chalk, of the greensand, gault, and sandstones, as has already been observed, point to such revolutions and cycles in the history of animated nature. MAN, who is himself an evident exception to all this, may perhaps, _as_ an exception, be said to prove that such had been the rule. For, it must be remembered, _all_ the creatures were pre-Adamitic. Not only those vast saurians and mammals, whose fossil remains we have exhumed, and cannot contemplate without wonder, were prior to our race in their actual possession of the domain of the earth’s surface, but every bird, reptile, fish, and zoophyte were certainly made before the man. Now, as the man came last in order, but first in dignity, created in his Maker’s image, and endowed with dominion over all the works of His hand, there was no longer place or argument for extinction, substitution, or change, among the creatures. _Death_ was excluded, and could not enter into the world, unless by a moral delinquency of the chiefest creature. But already it is probable, although he perhaps knew it not, Man stood, even in the day of his innocence and happiness, in the midst indeed of a blooming creation, but upon the crust of a fossil world. Moreover, we know from Scripture that minerals find metals abounded; so that the presence of these near the Earth’s surface ought not to be referred (as by some they have been) to the epoch of Noah’s Deluge. “Gold and bdellium and the onyx-stone” were already in the “land of Havilah;” and Tubal-Cain was “an artificer in brass and iron,” which must therefore have been exposed in veins of the upper rocks. And if the Earth already showed her nuggets of gold and lumps of onyx, it is not likely that she was deficient in beautiful fossils. Certainly, such substances as manganese and native iron did not find their way into the heart of siliceous pebbles in _modern_ times. * * * * *