We bring this chapter to a close. Granite and its kindred rocks should stand associated with an actual history and poetry, not inferior to the history and poetry of man’s own handiwork; and we believe geology, so often regarded with dread by the uninitiated, will soon be considered worthy a patient and painstaking investigation. Remembering that geology is still an incomplete science, and that we have much yet to learn concerning the laws of organic and inorganic matter, we should be modest in the maintenance of any theory, while thankful for the acquisition of any fact. “We have yet to learn whether man’s past duration upon the earth—whether even that which is still destined to him—is such, as to allow him to philosophise with success on such matters; whether man, placed for a few centuries on the earth as in a schoolroom, has time to strip the wall of its coating and count its stones, before his PARENT removes him to some other destination.”[26] CHAPTER IV. THE PALÆOZOIC PERIOD. “In His hand are the deep places of the earth.”—DAVID. Trench, in his charming little book on the “Study of Words,” says of words that they are “fossil poetry.” He adds, “Just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or finely vertebrated lizard, such as now it may be, have been extinct for many thousands of years, are permanently bound up in the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would otherwise have been theirs; so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished—these, which would so easily have perished too, are preserved and made safe for ever.” Geology is the fossil poetry of the earth; such a poetry as those can never dream of who in a pebble see a pebble and nothing more. But to those who walk through this great and beautiful world intent upon finding material for thought and reflection, there is no “picking up a pebble by the wayside without finding all nature in connexion with it;” and the most retired student, in search not simply of the picturesque or of the beautiful, but of anything and everything that can minister to his profounder worship of Him to whom belongeth both “the deep places of the earth and the strength of the hills,” may say of his solitary rambles:— “There rolls the deep where grew the tree;— O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea.”[27]