Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/69

1866.] round might reasonably permit the bearer to rank, on a priori reasons, among the most confirmed of sluggards, even if Owen and Agassiz and Wyman had not so decided on strictly scientific, anatomical grounds.

My dear Madam, does it ever occur to you, when you wonderingly gaze on the strange relics around this hall,—these stony skeletons, these silent remnants of extinct races, that you are face to face with rock-buried creatures, who lived and sported and mated, who basked in the sunlight and breathed in the air of this world, hundreds of thousands of years before you were thought of? who rested in the shade of the trees which made the coal that warms you to-day? who trod the soft mud which now builds in solid strength the dwellings which shelter you? who darted through the deep waters that foamed over a bed now raised into snow-capped mountains? who frolicked on a shore now piled with miles of massive rock? whose bones were petrifactions untold ages before the race was born which built the Pyramids? Do you really understand how far back into antiquity these grim fossils bear you? Can you really conceive of Nature, our dear, kind, gentle mother, in those early throes of her maternity which brought forth Megatheria and Ichthyosauri,—when the "firm and rock-built earth" was tilted into mountain ranges, wrinkled by earthquakes, and ploughed by mighty hills of moving ice? And yet in those distant days, which have left their ripple-marks and rain-drops in the weighty stone, there was life, warm, breathing, sentient life, which, dying, traced its own epitaph on its massive tomb. Shakespeare, Cæsar, Brahma, Noah, Adam, lived but yesterday compared with these creatures, whose stone-bound bones were buried in the sands that drifted on the shores of this world centuries before the first man drew into his nostrils the breath of life. Does the thought ever occur to you, that, ages hence, some enthusiastic student of nature may puzzle his brains over the bones of some such humble individuals as you and I, and wonder to what manner of creature they belonged? Or that, perched upon the shelves of some museum in the year 500000, they may be treasures of an unknown past to the Owens and Wymans of that day?

You wish I would not talk so?—Well, Madam, let us leave this mausoleum of the past, and come forth into the life of 1866; and let us see whether all the disjecta membra of extinct being are ranged around the walls of this classic hall, or whether we may not find something akin near our own snug and comfortable homes. I think I know some hardened hearts which have ossified around the soft emotions which in earlier years played therein. And, bless you, Madam, I meet every day, in my down-town walks, some strange animated fossils, more repellent than any I ever beheld in the Natural History cabinet. These bear the unfamiliar look which belongs to a fabulous age, and rest, silent and unobtrusive, in their half-opened cerements. The others wear a very familiar form, which belongs to our day, yet they are the exponents of a dead life which animated the buried bones of barbarism. The innocent Megatheria and Ichthyosauri crawled and paddled and died in their day; but these living fossils have the vital forms of the life above ground, while they bear within the psychical peculiarities of extinct beings. They creep about on the shores of time with the outward shapes of their fellows, and, when buried in its rising waves, will leave undistinguishable remains in their common tomb; and future explorers will never trace therein the evanescent peculiarities in which the two were so unlike.

Bones! Why, the whole earth is a big bundle of them. They are not only in graveyards, where "mossy marbles rest"; they are strewn, "unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown," over the whole surface of the globe, and lie embosomed in the gulfs of the great, restless ocean. Who knows what untamed savage rests beneath us here? Don't start, my dear Madam. I have no doubt that, when Tommy plays