Through weary ages, full of strife and ruth,
          Thought reaches Truth ;
Through efforts, long in vain, prophetic Need
           Begets the Deed :

Nerve then thy soul with direst need to cope ;
           Life's brightest Hope
Lies latent in Fate's deadliest lair
           Never despair !

OUR PHANTOM SHIP ON AN ANTEDILUVIAN CRUISE.

Now that we can visit any portion of the
globe by taking a cab or an omnibus to
Leicester Square, who wants a Phantom Ship
to travel in? The world, as it is, has taken a
house in London, and receives visitors daily.
Nothing remains now for the Phantom, but
a sail into the world, as it was, or as it will be.
What if we steer into the future? there our
vessel will assuredly be wrecked: but we
desire not to be wrecked; no, since we are
retiring, let us retire decently, recede into the
past with a becoming dignity. For a voyage
into the past, therefore, we hoist our Phantom
flag: we mean to sail quite out of human
recollection, to the confines of existence, and
remain in dock among the Graptolites.

So we walk down Cheapside, bustle aboard
at London Bridge, and sail out, leaving man
behind us. Leaving man behind us; for a
thousand years roll back upon themselves
with every syllable we utter; years, by
millions and millions, will return about us,
and restore their dead before our ghostly
voyage back into the past is ended. We have
passed the Nore; man is behind us; man is
not created: we are on the ocean of a world
which has not felt the footstep of its master.
Land ho! then let us go ashore. This is
some part of South America; there rolls a
mighty river, like the rivers that now roll
over that continent; we plunge into dense
forests; let us now sit down under the trees,
and speculate upon that world, into which we
spirits of the future have receded. There is
a fallen trunk before us, on which ants and
other insects swarm; there is abundance of
dead vegetation under the dense shade of
these living boughs. A huge creature, a
colossal armadillo, looking like a tortoise very
little smaller than a horse, mounted on
massive bony feet, scratches and digs busily
by our side, eating his vegetable dinner. He
is the Glyptodon. Now, what comes? Trees
fall, and underwood gives way like grass
before a mighty fellow—elephant or hippopotamus?
His hind legs are three times more
massive than an elephant's; and look at his
tremendous tail! He is not twice your height,
I think, and I should guess him to be twenty
feet long. We must get out of his way; he
is making for this tree under which we sit.
Now, with a ten-navvy-power, he is digging
at the mossy slope we have deserted. He
will not hurt us: his neck is short, his head
is slender, and his teeth are grinders all of
them ; he eats no flesh, but that glorious old
tree he has chosen for the first course of his
dinner. Now, he has scratched a pit around
it, and plants himself upon his massive hind
legs, making a third supporter of his tail ;
then lifting his huge bulk, he throws his fore-
legs high upon the tree, so rocks and wrestles
with it. Let us escape from its neighbourhood,
lest we be overwhelmed by it in its fall.
The firmest roots cannot resist so terrible a
wrestler, and the great tree falls ; luckily
sideways. Now and then it falls upon the
head of its destroyer (whose name is
Megalotherium) and cracks his skull. But the skull
of' the Megalotherium is made thick and
spongy, so that such blows crack only the
outer plate, and are but rarely fatal. Now
the green twigs are vanishing ; the monster
dines.

Aboard our ship again ; as we pass out
of the wood we encounter Monsieur the
Mylodon, also at work upon a tree; he is not
so bulky as our other friend. There is a
fellow with a stiff long neck, neither a camel
nor a hippopotamus, the Macrauchenia.
What have we got at home? On our way
home, why should we not sail round by the
land, where there was New Zealand in '51?
There, in the forests, run birds without
wings; one, the Dinornis, greatly larger than
the largest ostrich. Now, then, homeward!
Ah! but where is home? " England, with all
thy faults, I love thee still! " but I can't find
thee, oh, my native land! Some of it is
under water, some is dry land, connected with
a continent not to be found on Mr. Wyld's
Globe. We run up against an iceberg,
floating as icebergs now float, down from
the North Pole. It is aground on a raised
part of the sea-bottom, and, melting there
under the warmer water, is depositing the
mud and gravel, and the lumps of rock or
boulders that it has scraped up in its travels.
When that sea-bottom shall be lifted up and
become land, there will be what they call a
local pleistocene deposit, and granite cropped
from rocks in Norway may lie in lumps upon
the soil of England. These bergs have floated
down on ocean currents setting from the
colder to the warmer seas.

What of the climate then? Why, as we travel
back into the past, we shall find the earth's
climate in a given place, varying within pretty
wide limits. Elevation of one part and depression
of another part of the earth's surface is
now going on, has always gone on, and
probably always will go on. What is now continent
has been sea before, as well as continent
before, and will be sea as well as continent
again. A hundred thousand years ago, Mr.
Wyld, had he and Leicester Square existed,
would have had to construct a model of the
earth with very different coast outlines from
those which now so accurately paint the land
that is. But climate depends very much
indeed upon the relative position of land and