Page:A Treatise on Geology, volume 1.djvu/263

 CHAP. VI. been replaced by new races of zamiae and cycadeæ, which, in their turn, vanished from the northern zones of the globe before the completion of the cretaceous system. The marine zoophyta were changed, though not to the same extent, both as regards the polyparia and crinoidea. One total change had come over the Crustacea,—not a single trilobite being known in the strata more recent than coal: the brachiopodous conchifera, the gasteropodous and cephalopodous mollusca, were equally altered. Two large assemblages of fishes had vanished before the deposition of the chalk; and both on the land and in the sea, gigantic reptile forms had come into being—reproduced themselves to a marvellous extent—and then all perished with the close of the secondary period.

How, then, can they, by whom the magnificent truths of elapsed time and successive creations have been put in clear and strong evidence, how can they be expected to yield to false notions of philosophy, and narrow views of religion, the secure conviction that, in the formation of the crust of the earth, Almighty wisdom was glorified, the permitted laws of nature were in beneficent operation, and thousands of beautiful and active things enjoyed their appointed life, long before man was formed of the dust of the ancient earth, and endowed with a divine power of comprehending the wonders of its construction? It is something worse than philosophical prejudice, to close the eyes of reason on the evidence which the earth offers to the eyes of sense; it is a dangerous theological error to put in unequal conflict a few ill-understood words of the Pentateuch, and the thousands of facts which the finger of God has plainly written in the book of Nature; folly, past all excuse, to suppose that the moral evidence of an eternity of the future shall be weakened by admitting the physical evidence for an immensity of the past.

Since the close of the secondary period, the earth's surface has been greatly altered and the boundaries of