This picture, too, gets gradually dim, and when the darkness and haze have cleared away, the scene is wholly new. For miles around there spreads out an expanse of water, like a wide lake, thickly dotted with islets of every form and size, clothed with a rich vegetation. Here a jungle of tall reeds shoots out of the water, clustering with star-like leaves; there a group of graceful trees, fluted like the columns of an ancient temple, and crowned by a coronal of sweeping fronds, spread out their roots amid the soft mud. Yonder lies a drier islet, rolling with ferns of every shape and size, with here and there a lofty tree-fern, waving its massive boughs high overhead. The vegetation, rank and luxuriant in the extreme, strikes us as different from anything visible at the present day, though, as our eyes rest on the muddy discoloured current, we can mark, now and then, huge trunks, branchless and bare, that recall some of the living pine-trees. The denizens of the water seem to be equally strange. Occasionally a massive head, with sharp formidable tusks, peers above the surface, and then the gleam of fins and scales reveals a creature some twenty or thirty feet long. Glancing down into the clearer spots, we can detect many other forms of the finny tribes, all cased in a strong glistening armature of scales, and darting about with ceaseless activity. Beyond this scene of almost tropical luxuriance, on the one side, lies the blue ocean, with its countless shells and corals, its stone-lilies and sea-urchins, and its large predaceous fish; on the other side stretches a far-off chain of hills, whose nether slopes, dark with pine-woods, sweep down into the rich alluvial plains. And then this landscape, too, fades slowly away, and thick darkness descends upon us. Yet through the gloom we feel ever and anon the rambling earthquake, and see in the distance the glare of some active volcano that throws a ruddy gleam amid the pumice and ashes, ever dancing along the surface of the sea. And now this last scene melts away like the rest, and dark night comes down in which we can detect no ray of light, and beyond which we cannot go. The record of the boulder can conduct us no further into the history of the past.