PREFACE.

    EVERY generation of man is born to stare at something, which, as long as eludes their understanding is a very African Fetishe to the many and a Gordian knot to the few. But Chance-the puppet-man of our race-volatile as the trifles it sets in motion, has a fresh miracle for every age: no sooner is the vulgar world a-tired with one spectacle than another rises to excite its wonderment, and thus, by long habit, a disposition to the marvellous is confirmed in the minds of the majority-which takes not the trouble to think-and of scepticism on the part of the philosophizing and melanic-the fraction that does. But there are mysteries which require a thousand years for their solution; grand phenomena that oppose high barrier to the human mind; lessons which teach us our own proper littleness better than the starry language graven on the face of the mighty heaven, or the ten thousand ponderous tomes bequeathed Us by the ancient times, of which they treasure the multifarious experience. Of these-few on account of their vastiness - rare because they require a seraph of our kind for their comprehension-Geology is the most wondrous and sublime. A monument inscribed by the finger of Jehovah to the purpose of men, they have been as ignorant of its nature as the scarabei are of that of the giant pyramid-built a temple to their divinity-around which they wheel. For when the first man, awoke to being and, at the same moment, to wisdom looking around him, expressed thus swelling joy by the adoration of the Creator, no scribe was present who should convey to his posterity the record either of the sensations that it was his peculiar lot to experience, or a transcript of those ideas which to his unique and primal soul were assuredly innate:- no, the fall of Adam was not guarded against, and we inherit its negative as well as positive consequences. Howbiet, there is no doubt that the antediluvians whose bones, ground to powder, any one may find in a gravel-pit-were well acquainted with the primary elements of geology as well as those of tile other practical sciences, for they were cunning artificers in metal, and knew the arts of building; but oral tradition is liable to much accident, and the stories of the primitive ages that survived with Noe, related by him to his family, soon met the doom that every thing of heavenly original underwent when placed at the mercy of a degenerate race:- they were sacrificed upon the altars of the dread Past, of which they were the accusing mementos, or corrupted by such metaphor as an heretical hierarchy-their unholy depositary-found it their interest to forge. Hence it is that in the various cosmogonies of the old kingdoms-of Babylon, China, India and Persia-we find so much palpable absurdity admixed with fact that is undeniable; so much extravagance with truth, that it is no easy matter to separate the antagonist principles so as to render the histories at all available. But of this we are certain, that the early progenitors of our stock were well skilled in the mechanical arts,

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