citadels of the gods by making ladders of mountains, indicate clearly
enough the different revolutions read by geology in the various strata
and rocky layers piled upon the primitive granite of the globe, the
bursting through of eruptions from the central fire, extruding and
uplifting mountains, and the subsidence of the ocean from one
ripple-marked sea-beach to another lower down. In those dim geologic
epochs, where annals are written on Mica Slate, Clay Slate, and
Silurian Systems, on Old Red Sandstones and New, on Primary and
Secondary Rocks and Tertiary Chalk-beds, there were topsy-turvyings
amongst the hills and gambollings and skippings of mountains, to which
the piling of Pelion upon Ossa was a mere cobblestone feat. Alps and
Apennines then played at leap-frog. Vast basaltic masses were
oftentimes extruded into the astonished air from the very heart and
core of the world. In truth, the old mythic cosmogonies of the ancient
East, South, and North are not a whit too grotesque in their
descriptions of the embryo earth, when it lay weltering in a sort of
uterine film, assuming form and regular lineaments.

There is nothing more drear, monstrous, wild, dark, and lonely in the
descriptions of the mythologic than of the scientific page. What more
wild and drear is there, even in Indian cosmogonic fable, than that
strange carbonigenous era of the globe, whose deposits, in the shape of
petrified forests, now keep us warm and cook our food, and whose relics
and souvenirs are pressed between the stone leaves of the secondary
rock for preservation by the Omnipotent Herbalist? Land and water were
then distinguishable,--but as yet there was no terrestrial animal,
nothing organic but radiata and molluscs, holly-footed and head-footed,
and other aquatic monstrosities, mailed, plated, and buckler-headed,
casting the shovel-nosed shark of the present Cosmos entirely into the
shade, in point of horned, toothed, and serrated horrors. These