land, fruitful in vegetation, in process of time became a swamp, and from the swamp became a sea. It will be a fresh surprise, but a fresh evidence of time’s duration, if above the limestone we find more clay with more plants buried in more mud, and over-topped by more limestone. Bearing in mind the old supposition, that order and beauty and life upon the globe are only six thousand years’ old, astonishment should reach its climax when we find, as we do, that within the thickness of only a few feet of the earth’s crust, the record that we have been describing is repeated again and again and again; but beyond the climax, a fresh and overpowering marvel awaits us, when, as at one spot in British America, the record expands itself from a few feet into sixteen thousand, showing conclusively by eighty successive bands of coal that fourscore times at least, and perhaps many more, while that thickness of the earth’s crust was forming, the waters gave place to dry land, and in turn the dry land to the waters,--showing conclusively that during all the period of these changes tall forests of graceful trees abounded on the globe, along with exquisite ferns and curious reptiles, and beetles and winged insects of great size and beauty; while fish replenished the waters, along with an infinity of shells and corals, and other inhabitants of the deep. Yet these sixteen thousand feet, these eighty successive forests, these hundred and sixty changes, comprise but a small fraction of the whole known succession of strata.