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CLASSIC

THE

AND THE

BEAUTIFUL

FROM THE

LITERATURE

OF

THREE THOUSAND YEARS.

BY THE

AUTHORS AND ORATORS OF ALL COUNTRIES.

HENRY COPPEÉ, LL D.,

EDITOR.

SELECT EDITION.

VOLUME IV.-SECTION II.

PHILADELPHIA:

CARSON & SIMPSON.

1898.

[blocks in formation]

808.8 C793a 1898

v. 4, pt. 2

THE SILURIAN BEACH.

267

THE SILURIAN BEACH.

[graphic]

ITH what interest do we look upon any relic of early hunan history! The monument that tells of a civilization whose hieroglyphic records we cannot even decipher, the slightest trace of a nation that vanished and left no sign of its life except the rough tools and utensils buried in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity. Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder. To me it seems that to look on the first land that was ever lifted above the waste of waters, to follow the shore where the earliest animals and plants were created when the thought of God first expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one's hand a bit of stone from an old sea-beach hardened into rock thousands of centuries ago and studded with the beings that once crept upon its surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave,-is even of deeper interest to men than the relics of their own race, for these things tell

more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God.

Standing in the neighborhood of Whitehall, near Lake George, one may look along such a seashore and see it stretching westward and sloping gently southward as far as the eye can reach. It must have had a very gradual slope, and the waters must have been very shallow; for at that time no great mountains had been uplifted, and deep oceans are always the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this by inference merely we have an evidence of the shallowness of the sea in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters.

Indeed, the fossil remains of all times tell us almost as much of the physical condition of the world at different epochs as they do of its animal and vegetable population. When Robinson Crusoe first caught sight of the footprint on the sand, he saw in it more than the mere footprint; for it spoke to him of the presence of men on his desert island. We walk on the old geological shores like Crusoe along his beach, and the footprints we find there tell us too more than we actually see in them. The crust of our earth is a great cemetery where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they lived. We

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