otherwise. But no fossil man or works of man have been discovered below alluvium, (in which we include drift ;) nor would any really scientific man risk his reputation by maintaining the existence of the human species earlier than the alluvial period. What an astonishing exhibition does this scientific fact bring before us! Suppose we could explain by chemical and organic laws how the inferior animals were gradually developed from one another in the successive periods of our world's history. Yet here we have the phenomenon of a being introduced at once, superior somewhat in organic structure to the other animals, but raised immeasurably above them all by his lofty intellectual, and moral powers,—a being destined to take the supreme control of all inferior natures, and, so far as need be, to subject them all to his will; and, in fact, to convert the elements into servants to do his pleasure. The anatomist can, indeed, describe his organization; the physiologist can point out the functions of his organs; and the zoologist can assign him rank at the head of animate creation; but how is the psychologist baffled when he attempts to unravel the wonders of his spiritual power, and the theologian when he looks into the depths of his moral and immortal nature! * * What greater miracle does even revelation disclose ?"

b1. Inferior animals.

§ 79. I propose, under this head, to restrict myself to the examination of a few of the fossils lately discovered in a single and not very large section of territory, the Bad Lands of Nebraska, called by the French trappers the Mauvaises Terres. The geological formation of these lands is of the tertiary period, and of all sections of

America as yet explored, they present objects of the greatest interest to the student of cosmical as well as geological science.* The traveler who descends from the vast and now dreary level of the surrounding prairie, is appalled by the sight of a basin of fossil cemeteries, sinking nearly two hundred feet below the adjacent surface. On the sandy soil of this basin rise an infinite series of minaret-pointed peaks, some jutting up two hundred feet, and many painted on the side with prismatic hues. The quaint-looking towers; the winding alleys which separate block from block; the occasional buttresses which round off one line of streets; the chimneylike turrets that rise over the level of the larger and more compact masses, give all the evidences of some vast but deserted metropolis. When, however, the observer descends to the supposed city, the delusion vanishes. The perpendicular walls fall backward into slanting, weatherbeaten rocks. The pavements crumble into sands, which, in the torrid heats of August, parch the traveler's feet as much as the vertical sun oppresses his brain. The chimneys are but blocks of rock, and the minarets splinters of spar.

These castellated structures, though they are not the evidences of human civilization, are the metres by which are noted the progress of events far more stupendous than those of mere mechanical enterprise. The turrets and columns of the Bad Lands are incrusted with the fossil remains of races submerged by the fresh waters of the early tertiary period.

This subject is more fully considered by the present writer, in the Episcopal Review for Jan., 1858, to which the reader is referred.

Animals which preceded the mammoth and mastodon—and between which and the mammoth and the mastodon there exists a chasm which neither class has overpassed-are here to be found in unequaled completeness. Thus, for instance, in the Archiotherium, a specimen discovered by David Dale Owen, in his exploration, and examined by Dr. Leidy,* are united characters belonging to the pachyderms, the plantigrades, and the digitigrades. With these are grouped a series of other individuals, which demonstrate, to use the language of Mr. Owen himself, by no means an intentional supporter of the Mosaic account, that "at the time these singular animals roamed over the Mauvaises Terres of the Upper Missouri, the configuration of our present continents was very different from what it now is. Europe and Asia were then, in fact, no continents at all, being represented only by a few islands, scattered over a wide expanse of ocean. The Atlantic seaboard of the United States, back to the mountain ranges, and up the Valley of the Mississippi as high as Vicksburg, was yet under water.-In Europe, during the period following the extermination of the eocene Fauna of Nebraska, the Alps have been heaved up nearly their whole height; and in Northern India the whole Subhimalayan range had been elevated."

§ 80. So it is that on the Bad Lands we find the waterguage, which marks the rise and fall of a deluge which, if not that of Noah, relieves that great phenomenon from the main cosmical difficulties with which it has been invested by the earlier skeptics. A deluge which, if not universal, was

* Owen's Geo. Sur., p. 198.

at least extensive enough to have submerged all the living members of a population as large and widely spread as that of Europe at the present time, not only is possible, but is shown to have actually taken place.

We have corroborating evidence as to the seniority of the American continent in the coal formations which Kansas and Iowa exhibit in common with the Atlantic States. Vegetable life in the Valley of the Euphrates did not begin until race after race of extinct species of plants had been buried in the Valley of the Missouri. This is thus noticed by Agassiz, in his work on Lake Superior. "It is a circumstance," we are told by this acute observer, "quite extraordinary and unexpected that the fossil plants of the tertiary beds of Enigen resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North America than those of any other parts in the world, thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present Eastern American Flora, and, I may add, the Fauna also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States are, as it were, old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera, Lagomys, Chelydra, and the large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils. of Enigen, are at least equally so; they bear the marks of former ages." And, on the same point, Hugh Miller says: "Not only are we accustomed to speak of the Eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent of the West, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contradistinction to

that postdiluvian world which has succeeded it. And yet, equally, if we receive the term in either of its acceptations, is America an older world still; an older world than that of the Eastern continents; an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the flood. And when the immigrant settler takes ax amid the deep back-woods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him; the brushwood which he lops away with a sweep of his tool; the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot; the lazy fishlike reptile that stirs out of his path as he descends to the neighboring creek to drink; the fierce alligatorlike tortoise, with the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water, and the little harelike rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way, all attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old a country the seemingly new one is, a country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the antediluvians and patriarchs, and only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose perished productions we find locked up in the loess of the Rhine, or amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the Old World." § 81. There is a peculiar emphasis in the teachings of the Bad Lands as to the fact of the creation and extermination of races now extant. "Every specimen as yet brought from the Bad Lands," says Mr. Owen, "proves to be of species that became exterminated before the mammoth and mastodon lived, and differ in their specific characters not only