of at least twenty-six thousand pieces, and so
constructed as to be proof at every point, and yet allow
of the freest movement. Shell-fish of the oyster
tribe soon appeared, and the crab had its
representative–not in an animal of the commonly
accepted form, but in a creature called a
Trilobite, very much like an immense woodlouse,
but more akin to our king-crab than most
of his edible brethren. The beautifully jointed
shells of this animal, exhibit the most contrivances
ever yet observed for securing freedom of
movement and protection at the same time.
These animals, like the molluscs, could see,
and perhaps hear, so that a great stride in
development had already been made.

As yet we see no sign of the enormous bulk
which distinguished the reptiles and mammals
of a later period. Beauty there was, however, of
its kind–beauty of form, if not of hue–for the
stone lilies were daintily sculptured with
geometrical patterns, resembling the style of the
"Early English."

The second day was no longer marked by the
palpable darkness which until then had shrouded
everything. Still, the atmosphere was dense
and torpid, like that supposed to hang round
Mercury and form the dark bands on the surface
of Jupiter; it was so laden with carbon, too,
that it must have proved fatal to any living being.
There was no land on which anything could
grow, for it had first of all to be irrigated by the
muddy rivers, or formed at the bottom of the
lakes; but it was nigh at hand; and, as the faint
light sinks into evening, it rises from the waters,
and with it the earliest traces of land, plants,
and fishes.

Again the curtain rises with returning light,
and reveals the laying down of the old red
sandstone, now made so familiar a word by the
genius of Miller, and bearing in its colour proofs
of the first appearance of that mighty mineral,
iron, which was in time to bring everything
under the rule of man.

The flora of the first garden was lowly
enough: club-mosses and ferns were well-nigh all
it could boast of. Even they are sparsely
scattered, and it is not till the old red sandstone is
about to disappear, that a fine Irish fern and a
pine-tree appear upon the stage.

The forming of this great geological production,
in every country the home of the earliest
land plants, appears to have been attended with
an amount of violence unusual even in those
stormy times. All the pomp and horrors that
the volcano and earthquake could lend, preluded
the appearance of regions to be tenanted by a
more developed race of beings. And when it is
remembered that there is a volcano at Piraunea
eight miles in circumference at its crater; that
Etna can discharge a hundred and forty million
cubic yards of lava at one eruption; that
Skaptar Jokul poured over the devoted plains
of Iceland at one and the same time, two streams
of lava, one seven and the other twelve miles
wide, and forty or fifty miles long; that Cotopaxi
glows at its summit like molten glass, and can
project a mass a hundred cubic yards in volume,
for eight or nine miles; and that Vesuvius can
bury towns,–we may form some faint idea of
the scene that must have presented itself when
these forces were extraordinarily active. When
cities are buried under floods of lava, or showers
of pumice-stones, when fields are converted into
useless wastes of fused mud, and whole districts
are covered with ruin, men are apt to view
the earthquake and volcano as unmixed evils;
but, when we reflect that the earthquake has
been the sole means of bringing to the surface
the evidence of the mineral treasures which lie
so far below; that it has revealed our coal, salt,
limestone, and clay–nay, that it even cofferdams
our mines to let us work them–we shall
see in it a great agent for redeeming man
from the precarious and wretched life of a
savage.

Fishes now appear for the first time; not the
kingly salmon and turbot, but voracious creatures,
armed with powerful means of destruction, and
clothed in complete armour, their skins being as
hard as bone, or rather composed of plates of
bone or horn, fitting, in one class, edge to edge,
like a tesselated pavement; in another, overlapping
each other, like the slates of a roof, and
furnished with a hook on the upper margin, to
fit into a pit in the lower edge of the scale
above. In some, a lustrous enamel covered the
scales. It is supposed that this armour was in
a measure a defence against the heat of the
waters, but it is more likely that it served as a
protection against a powerful enemy: the fish
of this kind being very unscrupulous about
attacking friend or foe when pressed by hunger.
Like the sharks of our day, to which they are
closely akin, they had the backbone prolonged
into the tail, which was unevenly fluked, enabling
them to turn upon their backs with great
quickness. Some of them were strange-looking
creatures; one, called a pterichthys, or flying-
fish, must have shown like an immense tadpole,
furnished with wings; another, the "buckler-
headed fish," was defended in front by a shield
of bone, shaped like a tulwar without a handle.

Some of the stone lilies of this period, which
grew in countless millions and formed the
marble of Derbyshire, and the Black Rock of
Bristol, were also very beautiful, and indeed the
mechanical contrivances in the shape of armour
were never surpassed by any of Nature's later
productions. One animal, called a holoptychius,
was furnished with fluted-pot armour, which,
ages afterwards, Oliver Cromwell, a practical
genius and capital judge, selected as the best
kind for a helmet, and the principle of which
is now extensively adopted in our corrugated
iron houses. It was also constructed so as to
give a dead shock to blows: having a firm outer
and inner coat, with a soft material between to
act like sand-bags; finally its inner coat
consisted of layers of fibres which crossed each
other, as in moleskin, so as scarcely to admit of
being torn.

After the old red sandstone had been deposited,
a vegetation arose which has never been
paralleled in the worst jungles of our tropical