cemetery or graveyard, entombing the remains of ages long anterior to
human creation. We, in fact, live upon a pile of worlds, and
anticipating the future from past records and from changes still
manifest from the shallowing soundings of neighbouring seas, it is not
improbable that the existing scene of bustle may have heaped upon it as
many superincumbent masses as the lowest of the rocks enclosing the
vestiges of life.

If not with a kind of awe, it must have certainly been with intense
curiosity that the first investigators of fossilology looked upon the
earliest forms of animated being of which we have any traces as existing
upon this globe. These first denizens, however, seem to have been of a
simple structure and humble order, not fit to play high class
characters. No land animals are found among them, none which could
breathe the atmosphere, none but tenants of the water, and even animals
so high in the scale as fish were wanting. In popular language, the
earliest fossils are corals and shellfish.

But to make the subject generally intelligible it will be necessary
first to define the orders of the animal kingdom. CUVIER was the first
to give a philosophical view of the animal world in reference to the
plan on which each animal is constructed. According to him there are
four forms on which animals have been modelled, and of which ulterior
divisions are only slight modifications founded on the development or
addition of some parts that do not produce any essential change of
structure.

The four great branches of the animal world are the _vertebrata_,
_mollusca_, _articulata_, and _radiata_. The _vertebrata_ are those
animals which (as man and other sucklers, birds and fishes) have a