The Foot-prints of the Creator : $b or, The Asterolepis of Stromness — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Foot-prints of the Creator : $b or, The Asterolepis of Stromness
John Stuart Mill · en
“But let us quit this wonderful city of the dead, with all
its reclining obelisks, and all its sculptured tumuli, the
memorials of a race that exist only in their tombs. And yet,
ere we go, it were well, perhaps, to indulge in some of those
serious thoughts which we so naturally associate with the
solitary burying-ground and the mutilated remains of the
departed. Let us once more look around us, and say, whether,
of all men, the Geologist does not stand most in need of
the Bible, however much he may contemn it in the pride of
speculation. We tread on the remains of organized and sentient
creatures, which, though more numerous at one period than the
whole family of man, have long since ceased to exist; the
individuals perished one after one—their remains served only
to elevate the floor on which their descendants pursued the
various instincts of their nature, and then sunk, like the
others, to form a still higher layer of soil; and now that the
whole race has passed from the earth, and we see the animals
of a different tribe occupying their places, what survives of
them but a mass of inert and senseless matter, never again
to be animated by the mysterious spirit of vitality—that
spirit which, dissipated in the air, or diffused in the ocean,
can, like the sweet sounds and pleasant odors of the past,
be neither gathered up nor recalled! And O, how dark the
analogy which would lead us to anticipate a similar fate for
ourselves! As individuals, we are but as yesterday; to-morrow
we shall be laid in our graves, and the tread of the coming
generation shall be over our heads. Nay, have we not seen a
terrible disease sweep away, in a few years, more than eighty
millions of the race to which we belong; and can we think of
this and say that a time may not come when, like the fossils
of these beds our whole species shall be mingled with the
soil, and when, though the sun may look down in his strength
on our pleasant dwellings and our green fields, there shall be
silence in all our borders, and desolation in all our gates,
and we shall have no thought of that past which it is now our
delight to recall, and no portion in that future which it is
now our very nature to anticipate. Surely it is well to believe
that a widely different destiny awaits us—that the _God_ who
endowed us with those wonderful powers, which enable us to
live in every departed era, every coming period, has given us
to possess these powers forever; that not only does he number
the hairs of our heads, but that his cares are extended to
even our very remains; that our very bones, instead of being
left, like the exuviæ around us, to form the rocks and clays
of a future world, shall, like those in the valley of vision,
be again clothed with muscle and sinew, and that our bodies,