Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/113

 Rh animal nutrition, from whence the materials of its body have been derived. Thus the great drama of universal life is perpetually sustained; and though the individual actors undergo continual change, the same parts are ever filled by another and another generation; renewing the face of the earth, and the bosom of the deep, with endless successions of life and happiness.

has, I trust, been stated in the preceding chapter, to show the paramount importance of appealing to organic remains, in illustration of that branch of physico-theology with which we are at present occupied.

The structure of the greater number, even of the earliest fossil Mammalia, differs in so few essential points from that of the living representatives of their respective Orders, that I forbear to enter on details which would indeed abound with evidences of creative design, but would offer little that is not equally discoverable in the anatomy of existing species. I shall, therefore, limit my observations to two extinct genera, which are perhaps the most remarkable of all fossil Mammalia, for size and unexampled peculiarities of anatomical construction; the first of these, the Dinotherium,