But quite as wonderful as the antiquity of this graveyard is the place where we find it. Here we stand: nine hundred miles to the east of us, as the crow flies, the Atlantic surges beat upon the coast, and wear away and rebuild the boundaries of our land. Two thousand miles to the west, lies the Pacific; nine hundred miles south, the Gulf of Mexico warms the Gulf Stream in its sunny bosom. Three thousand miles to the north, the Arctic Ocean, which no keel has ever crossed, groans and growls under the ice-floes. Very far from the seas are we not? What station could be more truly inland? And yet this graveyard is built up of corals and sea-shells and strange sea-creatures lie buried here. Over this height where we stand the waves have thundered. Here was “a yellow beach of sand”; here the busy coral polyp built its palaces up, up, up, from sea-bottom to sunshine. These are not pebbles crunching here beneath our feet, but sea-shells, mollusks of the prime. This is the burial-ground of fishes and of zoöphytes. Is not this burial-ground wonderful for its locality? And again it is wonderful for the distance which we must travel to find it. What is that? Did we not come here in a carriage, driving over a few easy miles, in a May morning? Let us see about that. Let me take you by the hand and lead you the real distance you must travel to reach this ancient burial-ground. Brace up your nerves, for we have to journey with the speed of thought, which is swifter even than light. Our starting-point is this modern age of the world, the age which has brought forth grasses, palms, fruits, the higher mammals--man. Swiftly we traverse this age, and leave its landmarks far behind us, as we pass them with our faces set toward the old, old world. This modern age is one of the five divisions of the Neozoic, or _new_ period. Through all the five we go, and at the gate of the one called the Eocene we pass out from under the palm shadows, from the mammals ranging in the forests and feeding on the green savannahs, and now we are back in the middle time, the age of the reptiles. The forests are dark with cycads and pines. Crocodiles, alligators, salamanders of very old-fashioned patterns, swarm the brakes and the bayous. Rushing above our heads go skin-winged flying things, with the tails and hands of lizards, and they crowd and cry about us for three ages more. We must needs be brave as knights as we go back deeper still into mystery and antiquity, and by the door of the earliest reptilian age we find our way into the longest of the epochs, the time with six ages, the age which saw the coal-beds laid down and so many fossils locked up in rock--the Paleozoic[28] time.