Contrast this catalogue with the few organic remains to be met with in the preceding period, and ask what called such a newly-inhabited world into being? The face of nature, so remarkably elaborated out of the waste and decay of these old stony materials, is moving all over with life—replenished, so far as yet discovered, with seventy-five generic and specific forms of new vegetation—a hundred and ten new forms of hard-working corallines—seven hundred and thirteen genera and species of the shelly tribes, from the simplest to the most complicated of the chambered orders—a hundred and sixty distinct races of fishes, placoids and ganoids—three varieties of the most strangely constructed mammalian quadrupeds, with thirteen kinds of insects to titillate and keep them in action—and all this array of organic life moving side by side with forty families of gigantic reptiles, herbivorous and carnivorous, creeping, swimming, and flying! The wonders of art have nothing to compare with this. The structure of a blade of grass will not suffer an atheist to live. During the six thousand years of man’s existence, one new living thing, of any order or type, has not been called into being. Astronomy is daily adding to her achievements, and penetrating farther among the systems of the universe; but the nebular theory of creation is gone, and the new-world germs will not expand at its fanciful bidding. Geology nobly bears testimony in every page to the rule of one supreme intelligent Creator—an exuberance of life and forms which announces the authoritative interposition of Him “Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect; Who calls for things that are not—and they come.” And the mandate goes forth, in that awful simplicity of OMNIPOTENCE, which learning cannot mystify nor ignorance overlook. This formation abounds in the remains of radiata, mollusca, and crustacea,—all of them differing specifically from those of the older secondary strata. The gigantic _crinoidea_ of the carboniferous age have disappeared, succeeded only by a few dwarfish specimens of the _apiocrinite_ and pentacrinite, while the _ammonites_ mark an increase of nearly two hundred species, preserved in the most perfect state in the shales and limestones of the lias and oolite. [Illustration: 1. Ammonites obtusus; 2. Section of Ammonites obtusus, showing the interior chambers and siphuncle; 3. Ammonites nodosus.]