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hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines stick out, the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions. The pterichthys shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain.

2. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread, and total so far as it extended. There are proofs that whatever may have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken place in a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by some slight undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a few inches, and still exhibit their enamel entire, and their peculiar fineness of edge.

3. The spines, even when separated, retain their original needle-like sharpness of point. Rays, well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are enclosed unbroken in the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which not only all the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff and threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was over. Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must have been of a kind by which the calm was nothing disturbed.

4. In what could it have originated? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences of an area, perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent, annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived, left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases of

mysterious origin break out at times in the animal kingdom, and well nigh exterminate the tribes on which they fall.

5. The present generation has seen a hundred millions of the human family swept away by a disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the fatal murrain that once depopulated the Alps, not more as a poet than as a historian. The shell-fish of the rivers of North America died in such vast abundance during a year of the present century, that the animals, washed out of their shells, lay rotting in masses beside the banks, infecting the very air. About the close of the last century the haddock well nigh disappeared, for several seasons together, from the eastern coast of Scotland; and it is related by Creech, that a Scotch shipmaster of the period sailed for several leagues on the coast of Norway, about the time the scarcity began, through a floating shoal of dead haddocks.

6. But the ravages of no such disease, however extensive, could well account for some of the phenonena of this platform of death. It is rarely that disease falls equally on many different tribes at once, and never does it fall with instantaneous suddenness; whereas, in the ruin of this platform, from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to have been equally involved; and so suddenly did it perform its work that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of terror and surprise.

7. I have observed, too, that groups of adjoining nodules are charged frequently with fragments of the same variety of ichthyolite; and the circumstance seems fraught with evidence regarding both the original habits of the creatures, and the instantaneous suddenness of the destruction by which they were overtaken. They seem, like many of our existing fish, to have been gregarious, and to have perished together ere their crowds had time to break up and disperse.

8. Fish have been found floating dead in shoals beside sub, marine volcanoes, killed either by the heated water or by mephitic gases. There are, however, no marks of volcanic activity in connection with the ichthyolite beds-no marks, at least, which belong to nearly the same age with the fossils. The disturbing granite of the neighboring eminences was not upheaved until after the times of the Oolite. But the volcano, if such was the destroying agent, might have been distant; nay, from some of the points in an area of such immense extent it must have been distant.

9. The beds abound, as has been said, in lime; and the thought has often struck me that calcined lime cast out as ashes from some distant crater, and, carried by winds, might have been the cause of the widely-spread destruction to which their organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting stream, over which a bridge was in course of building, destroyed in a single hour for a full mile below the erection, by the troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centering was removed.

LXXVIII. THE HERITAGE OF CULTURE.

1. Compare the condition of Christendom to-day with what it was when Roger Bacon's knowledge of mathematics was taken for witchcraft. Let the comparison include the physical condition and the intellectual and moral character of the people. The vast advance made since that period has required time. It has been the work of six centuries; and what one of the six has not made liberal contributions towards the grand result?

2. One gave Europe the germ of those now ancient universities in which the hearts and intellects of nations have

been formed. Another gave the mariner's compass and the printing press, and almost doubled the terrestrial inheritance of man by the discovery of a new world. Another gave the discovery of Copernicus, the Protestant Reformation, and the universal awakening consequent thereupon. Another opened the eyes of men to the advantages of commerce and discovery, and began the overturn of the old despotic notions concerning government.

3. Another gave the American Declaration of Independ ence, and the discovery of the law of gravitation. And the present is continually astonishing us by its contributions to human wealth and knowledge in every form and in every department. And what shall be achieved in the next? and the next? Let us not despair. ing! The stream of history is summation, notwithstanding an occasional small eddy that seems to be setting backwards.

Surely the millenium is comflowing on to a glorious con

4. My friends, the theme upon which I have attempted to speak to you is one of the greatest that can engage the attention of men. It is no less than the history of human thought in its highest and noblest efforts. I know of nothing better fitted to impress upon one the conviction of his own insignificance, and yet of his great responsibility. Compared with the whole sum of human thought, how puny is that of an ordinary man,- -or indeed of any man! And yet every man, and especially every scholar, comes into the line of succession, and is bound to transmit, unimpaired, and with whatever additions he may, the inheritance he has enjoyed.

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5. I have touched upon a very few general facts, connected with the most prominent and best-known forms of civilization. But the subject needs to be examined in careful detail. To the scholar the study cannot fail of being in the highest degree interesting and stirring. The old Greeks thought that they

could best train their boys to virtue and valor, by placing before them the narrative of Homer, and requiring them to study his description of the heroes who "fought at Ilium, on each side mixed with auxiliar gods." And if characters like these, stained with blood and debased by ignoble passions, could inspire Grecian youth with a love of what was good and great, how much may the scholar of to-day be built up and strengthened by a study of the men and women to whom he may be introduced in this history of human culture.

6. The memories of the good and wise are the noblest inheritance that comes to us from the past. They are the educational forces of the ages. And the ancient world is not alone our benefactor here. We have maintained that Christianity has not been a failure; and to declare that antiquity is alone our teacher here, that modern history furnishes no names illustrious enough to be held up as examples to the men of present and future time, is to declare that Christianity has signally failed.

7. But it is not so. Where shall we find such a spirit of self-sacrifice,—of general love for man, as that which has characterized Christian societies from the fathers to the present times? —a spirit which has filled every Christian country with asylums and hospitals for the unfortunate, the erring, the sick, and insane. Christianity does not, like the Spartans, throw its feeble children to the wolves and birds

of

prey because the state needs only those of strong limbs and lusty sinews.

8. No; it lavishes upon the feeble ones its most abundant cares. It labors to supply what nature and circumstances have failed to supply, whether the defect be in physical, intellectual, or moral strength. And inasmuch as it is more blessed to give than to receive,-inasmuch as moral greatness

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