But geology, as HISTORY, is truthful in the oldest as in the most recent of its narrations. How generally accurate in its family genealogies: their relations, kindreds, alliances, and individual peculiarities; the length and strength of body, contour of face, size, structure, and capacity of head, eye, and stomach—all as precisely determined and described in regard to the “habitans” of the most ancient fossiliferous rocks, as the living possessors of earth, sea, or air. Look into our museums, cabinets, monographs, and palæontological lists, and types of organic life are there, from which not only to number the tribes, but to tell of their own varying states and conditions. Wonders there are in geology. But its most seeming fables are realities. The placoids and ganoids of the silurian and devonian age, the exuberant flora of the carboniferous, the giant birds of the triassic, the matchless reptilian forms of the oolite, the microscopic organisms of the chalk, the colossal mammoths and mammalia of the tertiaries, were all as veritable productions of the island as the most familiar grains, grasses, and domesticated breeds which minister to our daily wants. How obscure, uncertain, and limited the range of human history! How extensive, and boundless, and minute the pursuits of geology, which touches on the history of all creatures that ever lived through all their species, genera, orders, and classes, and even remounts to the primeval condition of the planet itself during all the periods, phases, and revolutions of its existence! But of man there is no trace. No voice from the past, issuing out of the solid framework of the globe, intimates the existence of the human family anterior to the last of those great physical changes which we have been contemplating, and over the wreck of whose organic tribes the epoch of the tertiary sections of its crust closes.