yards thick, have, under the influence of
subterranean forces, been crumpled together like
a cloth in a child's hand. But this was the
work of force and time ; and over time we
pass, not caring for the breaks in human
knowledge, till we find our way back quite
into another epoch.

The sea is turbulent; often we see it beaten
into surf, and roaring over banks, exposed
and dismal at low water. But we pass on,
centuries rolling by, and sail again over the site
of England. Here we find many islands, small
and large; the sea is open northward to the
Arctic circle. Thick forests clothe these islands,
dark forests, with no bright green in their
foliage. The tree ferns raise above the lower
shrubs their graceful crests; the lofty
Lepidodendron spreads its feathery fronds; there
rises the fluted column of the Sigillaria; there
are the pine-like Araucarias; and one gigantic
fellow, that looks like the Norfolk Island pine,
rises a hundred feet above his fellows. Ferns
choke up the paths below. The paths! there
is no beast or reptile living now to tread
them; a few scarce birds or insects may be
flitting through the scene, whose silence only
winds and waves now interrupt. Rivers upon
these islets float some fallen vegetation down
into the sea; it is a vegetation, not of dense
wood, but of plants rapidly growing, succulent
or hollow in their stems. The remains of one
such stem, called Calamite, resemble the
jointed " horse-tail," or Equisetum, of our
marshes, on a grander scale, the stem being
a foot often in diameter. Another kind of
stem is here, called Sigillaria, from the neat
pattern which covers it; this belongs to a
tree whose matted fibrous roots are called
stigmaria. These, as fossils, shall belong to
coal. Even in that age of the world, that
'51, from which we are escaping, those who
walk in tropical island forests tread upon
a mass of fallen vegetation often ten feet deep.
These islands, with the changes of level
constantly occurring, shall sink under the wave;
the sea shall cover them with sand and mud;
but after a time they shall rise again, again
wear the dark plumage, relieved only by the
bright green of the low marshy places, again
sink; and hereafter each, pressed down under
the accumulated deposit of those ages through
which we have been receding, shall be mined
for in England as a coal deposit. Among the
fossils in the coal, there will be found, chemically
altered, whole trees upright as they grew
the base of a coal-field sometimes will be
formed as the base of the forest is formed by
the branching roots, Stigmaria, matted
together. Upright stems, snapped asunder 'by the
storm or by decay, shall be found standing as
they now stand, and containing in their hollow
cores the cones that drop from overhanging
trees.

We sail away, by coral reefs, and dredge for
shells of molluscs, which we find abundant:
these are reptilian fishes. That great fellow,
just under our bow, with wide jaws and some
teeth nearly a span long, is the Megalichthys.
There are representatives also of the shark
family, which, you perceive, is very ancient, or,
in other words, respectable.

Farther we sail back now across the depths
of time; there is no animal upon the land,
and in the sea there are the shell-fish still, and
many larger fishes. Agassiz, who lived in the
world with us when we were dwellers among
men, divided fish into four natural orders, two
of them prevalent, two insignificant. Now,
in this period through, which we travel, those
two orders, the Ganoid and Placoid,
insignificant among men, prevail, and rule the ocean.
There is the Cephalaspis, compared by Hugh
Miller to a saddler's cutting-knife; some people
ignorant of saddlers' cutting-knives might need
to be told that such an instrument is like a
Cephalaspis. There is the Pterichthys for which
Mr. Miller found a similitude in " a man rudely
drawn, the head cut off by the shoulders, the
arms spread at full length in the attitude of
swimming, the body rather lougthan otherwise,
and narrowing from the chest downwards,
one of the legs cut away at the hip-joint, and
the other, as if to preserve the balance, placed
directly under the centre of the figure, which
it seems to support." This graphic account
of a creature a few inches or a foot long, is
much as if one compared a penny-piece to a
man's head, shaved, and without features,
flattened down excessively by pressure.
Nevertheless, Mr. Miller—once a stone-cutter, but
now a doughty Scottish editor—wrote, for the
instruction of men, a very delightful book
upon that age of the world through which we
are here sailing, the period of "Old Red
Sandstone."

We have passed it now, and there are no
more fishes. In a sea broken by coral reefs
swim shoals of Trilobites, wood-lousy little
fellows, with large compound eyes. The earth
is desolate, but the sun shines, the wind
murmurs, and the shower falls; the eyes used by
an insect now, were needed in those days by
the Trilobite. Encrinites, too, there are enclosed
in many little stony plates, and growing on a
jslender stem of jointed stone. Molluscs there
are; some of them cephalopoda; that is to say,
of the most developed form. These
cephalopods, then, of a kind less formidable than
the cuttle-fish, were in those distant ages
monarchs of creation, the most powerful of living
animals. For we have now found our way to
the confines of life.

We have reached now the Graptolites, so
men name Corallines, the skeletons on which
lived little polyp colonies, whose records are
the first records of terrestrial life; the polyp
family being the most ancient. If we go
farther now, we pass, perhaps, the bounds
of life, and we pass, certainly, the bounds
of knowledge. So we run our Phantom Ship
on a primeval coral reef, and leave it there.
Let it dwell with the past.

We now take to the Phantom's boats, row
briskly back through a few dozen centuries