So this fossil arrangement is growing into quite a history of the past. And a geologist, looking at certain rocks, pushed up from underground, in England and in America, can say: "These are very different kinds of rocks, it is true, and it would be impossible to say how long the building up of the one might have taken place before or after the other. But I see that in both these rocks there are exactly the same kinds of fossil-remains, differing from those in the rocks above and below. I conclude therefore that the two rocks belong to about the same great age in the world's past history, when the same animals were living upon the earth." Observing and reasoning thus, geologists have drawn up a general plan or order of strata; and the whole of the vast masses of water-built rocks throughout the world have been arranged in a regular succession of classes, rising step by step from earliest ages up to the present time. [Illustration] AMERICA THE OLD WORLD (FROM GEOLOGICAL SKETCHES.) BY L. AGASSIZ. [Illustration] First-born among the Continents, though so much later in culture and civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the _New World_. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West. In the present state of our knowledge, our conclusions respecting the beginning of the earth's history, the way in which it took form and shape as a distinct, separate planet, must, of course, be very vague and hypothetical. Yet the progress of science is so rapidly reconstructing the past that we may hope to solve even this problem; and to one who looks upon man's appearance upon the earth as the crowning work in a succession of creative acts, all of which have had relation to his coming in the end, it will not seem strange that he should at last be allowed to understand a history which was but the introduction to his own existence. It is my belief that not only the future, but the past also, is the inheritance of man, and that we shall yet conquer our lost birthright.