Greenstone, basalt Of various ages (no fossils) Porphyry Granite, &c. If you read this table upwards from the bottom you will notice that life began in a very small way with Eozöon (the “life-dawn animal”), that fishes appeared afterwards, that the wonderful forests of the coal period then grew and were covered up by other rocks and pressed into solid coal, that numbers of great crocodile-like animals lived all through the oolite time, how the deep wide beds of chalk were laid down by humble foraminifera, and when we get to the recent newest beds of gravel, mud, sand, clay, &c., the sweepings by water of the older rocks ground down by ages of wear and tear, we have the mammoth, mastodon, megatherium, and other great vegetable eaters, and lastly Man himself with his simple weapons of stone, bone, and horn—our early forefathers. You must always keep in mind that the greatest of these changes have taken place very slowly. Mountains have been raised, and whole continents have been sunk by movements so slow that if the hands of a clock went only once round the dial in a year the hand would go faster than these mountains have risen or the continents sunk. Almost always whenever there has been sudden and _violent_ action it has been near volcanoes or during earthquakes; but these things, terrible as they are to the people living near, disturb only a very small part of the surface, and such violence neither buried the coal beds nor raised the slate hills of Wales. Many of the small effects of the internal force of the earth have been sudden and violent, but the greatest and grandest have been slower than anything we can imagine. If this had not been so, we should not find fossil shells just as they sank quietly to the bottom of ancient seas, quite undisturbed. We should not find delicate ferns and insects with all their breakable parts perfectly preserved, and as lightly laid as if you had put them away carefully in a cabinet upon cotton wool. Yet many of these have sunk down hundreds of feet below the open air where they _must_ have lived. We find the ripple marks of the waves on old sandstones, and even the prints of the feet of birds and animals as they walked upon that rock when it was soft sand, and the little pits made by rain-drops on the moist earth. All this speaks of stillness, and gentle movement, no violence. So slowly and softly have these rocks settled down, that we can read in them the history of the life that was. But if there had been any sudden and rough movement all these fossils might have been broken up and we should have had nothing but fragments, and the “puzzle of life” could never have been put together. Nature’s forces are immense, but they work slowly, irresistibly, and majestically. THE ICE AGE.