CHAPTER VII. SECONDARY FORMATIONS. _No. 1. The New Red Sandstone._ “There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen; the lions’ whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.”—JOB. We now take our leave of the Palæozoic period, and enter upon the investigation of other and more recent geological epochs in the history of the crust of our planet. This division is known by the names Secondary or Mesozoic,[64] and is inclusive of the New Red Sandstone, Oolitic, Wealden, and Cretaceous groups. If, in our previous survey, we have had our minds filled with wonder as we looked at the disinterred relics of past creations, and have gazed at these fossil forms of ancient life with almost a loving interest in their still remaining beauty; so, as we now study higher types of life, and behold how “other wonders rise, and seize the soul the prisoner of amaze,” we shall find reason upon reason for the penetration of our minds with the profoundest adoration of Deity. No man turning up a tumulus, and there finding coins, weapons, beads, vases, or other such historical relics, would venture to say such things were created there; on the contrary, he would acknowledge that they were Roman, and that he had come to that conclusion by perceiving their resemblance to other and similar ancient Roman relics, discovered where there could be no doubt of their origin and history. Or if a traveller were to visit the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and there find buried beneath the overwhelming torrent of once burning lava, all possible kinds of human memorials, not only in human _works_, but also in the skeleton remains of human _beings_, would he not come to the conclusion that these were indubitable evidences of those cities having once been inhabited by man, and that these skeletons were once covered with warm flesh, and that they had lived, and moved, and had their being, even as we do now, amidst the activities and enjoyments of actual life? We apply this to geology. There are persons who never judge by _evidence_, (though what else have we to judge by?) but rashly jump to conclusions about geological facts, that have not a particle of common sense to sustain them. They never think that every rounded pebble they meet with has been so rounded by the action of water; they imagine sand to have been created as sand, instead of taking the geologist’s proof, that all sand has been produced by the action of moving water on solid rock. They believe that fossils were created, and that God put encrinital remains, and dead ammonites, and bones of saurians, and teeth and bones of great mammals, in the earth, just as we find them in the cliffs and caves of this and every country; and they imagine that thus to account for the wonders of creation redounds to the glory of that God whom thus they ignorantly worship. Even our great