by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living thing could breathe and continue to live.  Hence it was, that vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface.  Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky.  These stupendous forests stood alone upon the surface of the earth; no animals wandered through their fastnesses; no birds sported amidst their mighty branches; noxious exhalations came steaming up from their tangled recesses, and their gloomy shadows lay a mantle of darkness over dreary and lifeless solitudes.  The storms raged, and the winds howled; the sun travelled its daily rounds, with its light dimmed and clouded by the pestilential vapors it exhaled, and silence, so far as the sounds of animal life were concerned, reigned supreme—­the stillness of the grave, the quiet of utter desolation, save the voice of the wind or the storm, was unbroken all over the face of the earth.  Onward, and onward, rolled this mighty orb on its pathway through the heavens, bearing with it no animal existences, freighted with no human hopes—­carrying with it nothing of human destiny.  Man, with all his lofty aspirations, his mighty schemes, his glory, and his pride, was a thing of the future.  He had not yet emerged from the eternity of the past, to grapple with the present, or encounter the retributions of the eternity which is to come.  This was the era of gigantic vegetable growth, and it had its uses; for it was preparing the way for higher and more complicated existences.  As the gases that surrounded the earth became consolidated into vegetation, as this stupendous growth decomposed the noxious atmosphere, drawing from it its grosser particles and working them up into solid matter, extracting from it what was fatal to animal life, this earth entered upon another era of its progress.

“Animal life made its appearance.  It was weak and feeble at first, but a step removed from vegetable matter.  The molusca, the polypi, and the rudest forms of fishes, were, beyond question, the first of living things.  Science demonstrates that the water brought forth the first creations endowed with animal vitality.  How long this era continued no man can tell.  Then came the amphibise, gigantic animals of the lizard kind; the sauruses, that could reach with their long necks and ponderous jaws across a street and pick up a man, if street and man there had been.  Then came land animals, monstrous in growth, by the side of which the elephant dwindles to the diminutive stature of the dormouse.  In all these advances, was a succession of steps, mounting higher and higher, in complication of structure, each more perfect in organism than its predecessor.  Vegetation itself became more complicated, and as it approached perfection lost its gigantic growth.