It is only since yesterday that science has attempted to unriddle the hieroglyphics in which the past history of our planet reveals itself to man, and it stands to reason that in so difficult a study truth must often be obscured by error; but although the geologist is still a mere scholar, endeavoring to decipher the first chapters of a voluminous work, yet even now the study of the physical revolutions of our globe distinctly points out a period when the molten earth wandered, a ball of liquid fire, through the desert realms of space. In those times, so distant from ours that even the wildest flight of imagination is unable to carry us over the intervening abyss, the waters of the ocean were as yet mixed with the air, and formed a thick and hazy atmosphere through which no radiant sunbeams, no soft lunar light ever penetrated to the fiery billows of molten rock, which at that time covered the whole surface of the earth. What pictures of desolation rise before our fancy at the idea of yon boundless ocean of fluid stone which rolled from pole to pole without meeting on its wide way anything but itself. Ever and ever in the dark-red clouds shone the reflection of that vast conflagration, witnessed only by the eye of the Almighty, for organic life could not exist on a globe which exclusively obeyed the physical and chemical laws of inorganic nature. But while the fiery mass with its surrounding atmosphere was circling through the icy region of ethereal space (the temperature of which is computed to be lower than 60° R. below freezing point) it gradually cooled, and its hitherto fluid surface began to harden to a solid crust. Who can tell how many countless ages may have dropped one after the other into the abyss of the past, ere thus much was accomplished; for the dense atmosphere constantly threw back again upon the fiery earth-ball the heat radiating from its surface, and the caloric of the vast body could escape but very slowly into vacant space? Thus millions of years may have gone by before the aqueous vapors, now no longer obstinately repelled by the cooling earth-rind, condensed into rain, and, falling in showers, gave birth to an incipient ocean. But it must not be supposed that the waters obtained at once a tranquil and undisturbed possession of their new domain, for, as soon as they descended upon the earth, those endless elementary wars began, which, with various fortunes, have continued to the present day. As soon as the cooling earth-rind began to harden, it naturally contracted, like all solid bodies when no longer subject to the influence of expanding heat, and thus in the thin crust enormous fissures and rents were formed through which the fluid masses below gushed forth, and, spreading in wide sheets over the surface, once more converted into vapors the waters they met with in their fiery path.