The first beams of the rising sun, and the first grey light of the morning, tell us of the coming day; but we cannot even think of the dawn of that far-off day in the Earth’s history, when no voice of man or beast was heard, and no trees or grass covered it, without solemn wonder at the immense distance that day is from us. A thousand ages are in the sight of the Creator but as yesterday, and the period of man’s existence is only a moment compared to that of the lowly creatures which built up this World for him. In the first seas and on the land nothing was heard but the rushing of waters and the roaring of the fires of volcanoes. It is impossible to be quite certain whether the first living things were animals or plants; but I think it most likely that very simple plants grew first, and that very simple animals came after or with them. Among the first of these, or perhaps the very first, were some small animals called _Eozöon_, which means the “life-dawn animal,” and with them grew some simple plants. On the banks of the St. Lawrence river in Canada there is a great bed of rock called the Laurentian rocks, made almost entirely of the tiny remains of the “life-dawn animal,” which, when we look at them through a microscope, are found to possess nearly the same structure as some lowly organized shells living in the seas now. These rocks are found in many parts of the world besides—in Eastern America, Bavaria, Scotland, and Norway; and in some places their thickness has been estimated at thirty thousand feet, or nearly six miles, or one hundred times as thick as St. Paul’s Cathedral is high! These little creatures you see were at work over a great part of the Earth’s surface, and you may fancy how many thousands of thousands of years it took them to build up these rocks. The “life-dawn animal” is far older than the chalk-building foraminifera, and so far as we know it lived alone in its seas. There were none of the beautiful twisted _ammonite_ shell-fish, nor the shark-like fishes of the chalk seas. The eozöon was the only kind of living creature, the “lord of creation” for the time; and though storms raged in the seas it inhabited, the water was so deep that it lived on undisturbed. When you are able to use a microscope you will be able to see the traces left by these tiny animals in what is now hard stone.[1]