to an extent of ocean covering about four hundred miles.  Now I have made a special study of the Devonian rocks of Northern Europe, in the Baltic and along the shore of the German Ocean.  I have found in those deposits alone one hundred and ten kinds of fossil fishes.  To judge of the total number of species belonging to those early ages by the number known to exist now is about as reasonable as to infer that because Aristotle, familiar only with the waters of Greece, recorded less than three hundred kinds of fishes in his limited fishing-ground, therefore these were all the fishes then living.  The fishing-ground of the geologist in the Silurian and Devonian periods is even more circumscribed than his, and belongs, besides, not to a living, but to a dead world, far more difficult to decipher.

But the sciences of Geology and Palaeontology are making such rapid progress, now that they go hand in hand, that our familiarity with past creations is daily increasing.  We know already that extinct animals exist all over the world:  heaped together under the snows of Siberia,—­lying thick beneath the Indian soil,—­found wherever English settlers till the ground or work the mines of Australia,—­figured in the old Encyclopaedias of China, where the Chinese philosophers have drawn them with the accuracy of their nation,—­built into the most beautiful temples of classic lands, for even the stones of the Parthenon are full of the fragments of these old fossils, and if any chance had directed the attention of Aristotle towards them, the science of Palaeontology would not have waited for its founder till Cuvier was born,—­in short, in every corner of the earth where the investigations of civilized men have penetrated, from the Arctic to Patagonia and the Cape of Good Hope, these relics tell us of successive populations lying far behind our own, and belonging to distinct periods of the world’s history.

* * * * *

In my next article I shall give some account of the marshes and forests of the Carboniferous age, with their characteristic vegetation and inhabitants.

CORALIE.

    Pale water-flowers,
  That quiver in the quick turn of the brook,
    And thou, dim nook,—­
  Dimmer in twilight,—­call again to me
  Visions of life and glory that were ours,
  When first she led me here, young Coralie!

    No longer blest,
  Yet standing here in silence, may not we
    Fancy or feign
  That little flowers do fall about thy rest
  In silver mist and tender-dropping rain,
  And that thy world is peace, loved Coralie?

    Our friendships flee,
  And, darkening all things with her mighty shade,
    Comes Misery. 
  No longer look the faces that we see,
  With the old eyes; and Woe itself shall fade,
  Nor even this be left us, Coralie!

    Feelings and fears
  That once were ours have perished in the mould,
    And grief is cold: 
  Hearts may be dead to grief; and if our tears
  Are failing or forgetful, there will be
  Mourners about thy bed, lost Coralie!