“Following our history chronologically, _Reptiles_ next took the lead, and, with some evanescent exceptions, they flourished during the countless ages of the secondary period as the lords and despots of the world: and they had an organic perfection corresponding to their exalted rank in Nature’s kingdom; for their highest orders were not merely great in strength and stature, but were anatomically raised far above any forms of the Reptile class now living in the earth. This class, however, was in its turn to lose its rank. _Mammals_ were added next (near the commencement of the tertiary period), and seem to have been added suddenly. Some of the early extinct forms of this class, which we now know only by ransacking the ancient catacombs of Nature, were powerful and gigantic, and we believe well fitted for the place they filled. But they in turn were to be degraded from their place in Nature, and she became what she now is by the addition of man. By this last addition she became more exalted than before. Man stands by himself, the despotic lord of the living world; not so great in organic strength as many of the despots that went before him in Nature’s chronicle, but raised far above them all by a higher development of brain, by a framework that fits him for the operations of mechanical skill, by superadded reason, by a social instinct of combinations, by a prescience that leads him to act prospectively, by a conscience that makes him amenable to law, by conceptions that transcend the narrow limits of his vision, by hopes that have no full fruition here, by an inborn capacity of rising from individual facts to the apprehension of general laws, by a conception of a cause for all the phenomena of sense, and lastly, by a consequent belief in the God of nature:—such is the history of nature.”[34] [Illustration: LANDS END, CORNWALL. ] CHAPTER V. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. “The fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.”—JOB.