Millions of millions here, from age to age, With simplest skill, and toil unweariable, No moment and no movement unimproved, Laid line on line, on terrace, terrace spread, To swell the heightening, brightening gradual mound, By marvellous structure climbing towards the day. Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by them; Hence what Omnipotence alone could do, Worms did. [Illustration: WALTONIAN AND MANTELLIAN FISHERMEN. ] CHAPTER XII. THE TERTIARY SYSTEM. “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind.” MOSES. In our rapid sketch of the materials constituting the crust of the earth, we first of all, in that imaginary section which we supposed to have been laid bare to us, studied the characters of the hypogene rocks,[110] that make up the Azoic period, in which, with the exception of a few zoophytes, all nature was void of animal, life and possessed only by the genius of dread silence. Rising higher, we surveyed the Palæozoic or primary rocks, where the fishes of the Old Red Sandstone convinced us of progress in the forms of life, and taught us our first lesson in the ascending scale of those types of life with which Palæontology has now made us familiar. Leaving this period at the Carboniferous era, we entered upon the Mesozoic,[111] or Secondary period, ushered in amidst strange convulsions that must again and again have rendered the earth “without form and void;” and here we found ourselves in company with the strange and gigantic remains of a higher order of vertebrated animals, the saurians, the crocodile-kings of a bygone period; and as we pondered these hieroglyphics of past generations, our souls “were seized the prisoners of amaze;” and now, in our upward ascent, leaving behind us the scenes “Where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of nature, held Eternal anarchy,” we come to the Cainozoic,[112] or Tertiary Rocks, where other and higher types of life are found. Huge mammals, beasts of prodigious size, are now found inhabitants of the earth, the precursors of man—reasoning, intelligent, responsible man, who is presently to make his appearance on this great theatre of life, “made a little lower than the angels,” to have dominion over the works of Jehovah’s power.