Having made man, the writer says: “God ended his work” (Gen. ii., 2). He made man and ceased the work of creation. Strange, that the writer should say this, and yet in the very same chapter contradict the statement, by the “new creation” of a woman! The dogma, however, that the creative work of God was sealed up, never to be re-opened when man was made, is in direct antagonism to the whole reading of the rocks. Geology shows us worlds of extinct vegetables and animals, the types of which, in one geological period differed entirely from those which existed at a succeeding one, and every anterior period had a flora and a fauna wholly unlike any of those with which we are familiar. There are hosts of creations at every era, and there has never been a period from the mystical “Beginning,” when the creative force has ceased from its operations. At one period we see nothing superior to shell-fish and sea-worms, and for a time the work of creation seems ended; but another set of rocks unfold themselves, and show us myriads of molluscs, especially of the arm-footed kind, trilobites and graptolites, stone-lilies and corals. Again a change comes over created things: mountains are upheaved, but no grass grows upon their sides, the ocean bed is contracted, and the waters are tenanted by innumerable swarms of fishes, for the most part unlike any which now exist. This dynasty of the fishy tribe gives place in time to the “age of ferns and mosses,” and the lizard race makes its appearance; but it is not till we come to the “secondary group of rocks” that we meet with the fish-lizards and the predacious plesiosaur, the bird-beaked saurian, and the labyrinthodon. Ages roll on, ages past all calculation, and new families of molluscs, fishes, and reptiles put in their appearance for the first time: ammonites and belemnites among the molluscs; eryons and horse-shoes among crustaceans; pterodactyls, teliosaurs, steneosaurs, and megalosaurs among reptiles, with here and there a sort of opossum, the first type of the mammal family. In the air flew the giant pterodactyl; on the dry land stalked the ponderous megalosaurus; in the sea whole hosts of marine lizards pursued their carnivorous instincts. Huge turtles crept along the muddy coasts, and strange fishes swam in the deep ocean; but no man existed; no flocks fed upon the mountains; no birds carrolled in the groves. The lordly lion commanded not in the forest; the majestic eagle was not the king of birds. The master spirits were saurians, whose sway was universal; and this brings us to the third great era, that of the tertiary rocks. This third series of rocks contain fossils more and more nearly allied to existing plants and animals; we meet with mammals in considerable numbers, but by far the largest number of them are thick-skinned, and, as a rule, they were both more bulky and longer in the legs than those which now exist.