Part 16

The next drawers contain the supermedial series, beginning with the magnesian limestone, new red sandstone, and red marl. There are very large districts of this formation in the central parts of England, and they include the great deposits of rock-salt, which is of so much importance, he says, to the empire. Considerable beds of gypsum are also found; but it contains no organic remains of either animals or vegetables. Above these,--for you no doubt have perceived what I forgot to mention, that my uncle began at his lowest drawer, in order to shew the lowest strata first,--above these, he showed me a collection of the lias and oolite strata, both of them impure limestones, but extremely rich in the number and variety of organic remains. These consist of ferns and flags, corals and zoophytes, shells of all kinds, univalve, bivalve, and multivalve; ammonites of all sizes, fishes of several species, and turtles and other amphibia unlike any of the species now known. To one of these amphibia has been given the name ichthyosaurus, which, my uncle says, means the fish-like lizard; it having the head of a crocodile and the back bone of a shark; he has only a small specimen, which stands over the book-case, but he says some have been found in the lias near Lyme, in Dorsetshire, three or four feet in length. And he told me that at Stonesfield, near Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, the fossil remains of another extraordinary animal of the amphibious tribes was discovered, which has been called the monitor; no complete skeleton of it has yet been put together, but many of the detached parts must have belonged to an animal forty feet long, and twelve feet high!

The remainder of this numerous series consists of different strata of sands and clays, and various limestones, up to the chalk formation; and they contain a repetition of the fossils he shewed me in the lower parts of it. He frequently made me observe, that these fossils are all not only very widely distinguished from the families found in the carboniferous and transition series, but that there are also striking peculiarities in themselves according to the bed which they occupy.

We came next to the great chalk formation, with its wonderful deposition of flints in parallel layers; and then to the last, or superior order, consisting of gravel or sand, or of clay, which is in some places four or five hundred feet thick, and resting on the chalk. Its organic remains are highly interesting; but my uncle said he would not perplex our memories at present, by a minute examination of the specimens in his collection; he wished to give us general ideas, hereafter we may study the particulars. Before he closed his drawers, he shewed us, that below this upper formation all the remains of organic bodies were in a petrified or mineralized state; that is, the general structure and external form of the body has been preserved, but the original matter of which it was composed has entirely disappeared, and has been replaced by the substance of the mineral in which it was imbedded. On the contrary, in the strata which cover the chalk, the shells are merely preserved, and in such a state, that when the clay or sand in which they lie is washed off, they might appear quite recent, if they had not lost their colour and become more brittle. My uncle shewed us a few specimens of these, and also of some shells, which he says are peculiar to _fresh_ water, but which are often found in alternate layers with the _marine_ shells, as if they had been deposited by alternate inundations of fresh and salt water. And lastly, he shewed us some of the shells found in a horizontal stratum of gravel on the coasts of Essex and Suffolk, about fifty feet above the sea, which are exactly the same with the shells at present existing in the sea on the same coast. Above all these regular strata, he says, there is in many places spread a confused covering of gravel, apparently formed by the action of a deluge, which had shattered and rounded the fragments of the rocks over which its torrents had swept.

In this gravel the remains of numerous land quadrupeds are found; many of them of species now unknown, such as the mastodon, and mammoth or fossil elephant, with varieties of the hyæna, bear, rhinoceros, and elk, but indiscriminately mingled with others, which still exist in the country.

I have taken a good deal of pains to acquire a clear idea of this order of the strata, with their vegetable and animal remains. My uncle did not shew them all at one time, we went over them by degrees, a little every day; but I have just summed them up altogether, to give you an idea of what I have seen.

_24th, Good Friday._--Before we went to church to-day, my uncle spoke to us for a short time on the solemn event we were going to commemorate; and though my notes of what he said can be of little use to you, yet I am anxious to shew my dear mamma that I take still more pains to profit by what he tells us on this most important subject, than upon Geology or any thing else.

“You are all too well acquainted with Scripture,” said he, “not to know that the lesson which it everywhere inculcates, is, that man by sin and disobedience had fallen under the displeasure of his Maker, and that there was an invincible necessity, however inexplicable to our comprehension, that our Saviour should lay down his life to redeem us from that sin, and to procure for repentant sinners forgiveness and acceptance.

“That the death of Christ was the real and efficient sacrifice, of which the various offerings under the law were but the types or shadows, is evident from a crowd of passages in Holy Writ to which I have repeatedly drawn your attention. But as if to prevent the possibility of doubt on the subject, St. Paul emphatically tells the Hebrews that the High Priest entering into the Holy of Holies with the annual sin-offering was only ‘a figure for the time then present.’ And he distinctly adds, that Christ, not ‘by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood, obtained eternal redemption for us.’

“The promise made to our first parents intimated a future deliverer, who should remove those evils which had been entailed on mankind by their misconduct. This was the assurance that became to the Israelites the grand object of their faith; and it was to perpetuate this fundamental article of their hope and belief, that a standing memorial both of the fall and of the promised deliverance was appointed. Now, what memorial could be more apposite, than that of _animal sacrifice_?--It connected in one view the two great events in the moral history of man, the Fall, and the Recovery: the death denounced against sin, and the death appointed for that Holy Intercessor whose blood was to be accepted as a final atonement.

“How true it is, that the ways and thoughts of God are not like those of men!

“Wonderful in every part of it, but chiefly in the last acts of it, was the awful scene of this stupendous expiation. That the author of life should himself be made subject to death--that his sufferings and humiliation should be the manifestation of his glory--that by stooping to death he should conquer death;--and that the height of human malice should but accomplish the purposes of God’s mercy!

“If you compare the whole chain of prophecies with the history of our Lord’s sufferings, you will find that it was not until they were fulfilled to the minutest point, that the patient Son of God, as if then at liberty to depart, said ‘It is finished.’--Yes, all that the wicked were destined to contribute to the general deliverance was finished.

“We cannot understand the mysteries of God; but we may easily perceive his goodness. We cannot discover his motives, but we have no difficulty in discovering his will. We cannot comprehend the actions of Providence, or the moral government of the universe; but we can have no uncertainty about the laws which should govern our own actions--they are clearly and forcibly stated in the Gospel; all that it imports a sinful being to know, to believe, or to do, all that concerns our fall and our redemption, everything that involves the greatest interests of the human race, is there unfolded. We cannot penetrate that inscrutable decree which rendered it unfit to pardon sin without vicarious atonement; but we may form some faint conception of the immense sacrifice that Christ made for us, in order to satisfy Eternal Justice. From the horror with which he contemplated his approaching death, and from the agony with which he prayed that the cup of bitterness might pass from him, we may surely infer that his sufferings were of no ordinary nature--that the sacrifice was, indeed, great. Yet in the depth of his anguish, his prayer was one of perfect resignation and devout humility--‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.’

“Let us then learn, from his great example, how and where to seek for consolation when misfortune or misery overtakes us; let us pour forth our petitions with the same fervour as he did; and let us bow with the same submission in our hearts to the decrees of unerring wisdom.”

_25th._--My excellent aunt came down stairs yesterday evening, and this bright cheering day she took a little walk with my uncle. Grace and I had the pleasure of accompanying them. Every thing seemed to sympathise with her recovery--all nature seemed to be reviving--buds opening, and young leaves bursting out; many branches of hawthorn in sheltered places quite green, and the young elms feathered with their pretty opening leaves. The glades in the forest were carpeted with primroses--the birds were building in every bush, and singing as they worked; the lambs were sporting about, and the pastures beginning to shew the little cheerful daisy--

The lambkin crops its crimson gem, The wild bee murmurs on its breast, The blue fly bends its pensile stem Light o’er the skylark’s nest.

Grace repeated that pretty stanza of Montgomery’s; and when I asked her if she knew what was meant by “its crimson gem,” she replied, “Yes, Mamma told me that the buds of trees are called gems, from the Latin word _gemma_.” My uncle added that here the term is poetically applied to the flowers while yet unclosed--though it is only leaf-buds to which botanists give that name.

I begged of my uncle to shew me the difference between the oats and wheat; for though there is a great difference in their appearance when in ear, yet I had not learned to distinguish the young plants.

My uncle pulled up a plant of each, and shewed me that the oat shoots upwards, with scarcely more than two leaves, which are much rounder at the end than those of wheat; but that the plant of wheat produces three or four pointed leaves, which, instead of being directed upwards, are, at first, inclined to spread. After my aunt had returned home, we walked into some of Farmer Moreland’s fields. He is very busy sowing late oats, and planting potatoes in drills, which are made with as much regularity, and the seeds dropped in as equally, as if the distances had been measured by compasses.

The bees have been about for some days, a sure mark, my aunt says, of the arrival of spring. They began to venture out of their hives about the middle of this month; and their coming abroad is a sign that the flowers from which they gather honey are already opening.

The gooseberry trees are growing green, and I can distinguish the flower-buds enlarging daily; so are those of the currant, which in autumn I saw closely folded up in little scaly buds. The larch trees are shewing their gay green tinge, the spurge laurel is in bloom; and every tree, and plant, and bird, are rapidly advancing toward the perfection of summer.

I said to my aunt this evening, that I thought the appearance of all nature wakening, as it were, from the torpor or death of winter, seemed to be peculiarly suitable to the hopes of that glorious change in ourselves which this period so forcibly brings to our minds. She replied, that it was one of those striking points of connexion between natural and revealed religion which must make a deep impression on every reflecting mind; and she agreed with me that nothing could afford a better subject for a hymn.

_26th, Easter Day._--As soon as breakfast was over, my uncle said he was going to address a few words to us on the great Christian festival which we were going to celebrate.

“It is most satisfactory,” said he, “to know that whether we consider the number, the means of information, or the veracity of the witnesses, no testimony can surpass that which was borne by the Apostles to the fact of our Lord’s resurrection.

“That wonderful event was the accomplishment both of the ancient prophecies, and of his own predictions; it was a miraculous declaration on the part of God, that the great atonement was accepted; it was the Divine attestation to the truth of our Saviour’s doctrines; a full confirmation of the promises he had already held out to his followers, and consequently a perfect security to them for the ultimate completion of those further promises which it had been one great object of his mission to offer to mankind. We have reason, therefore, to be thankful that, in the first preaching of the Gospel, Providence ordained that a fact of such importance should be accompanied with irresistible evidence; evidence of such a nature as requires no nice examination to adjust, but such as imparts conviction to every one who can read the Bible.

“The Jews were disappointed that Jesus did not shew his power by coming down from the cross; but he shewed his power more fully, by rising from the grave. They saw him taken dead from that cross, and laid in a sepulchre, which was scooped out of the rock, which was accessible only at the entrance, and which was guarded by sixty soldiers. Yet while the soldiers watched, he burst those feeble barriers, and rose from his tomb, to shew his followers that those who die in Him shall rise, as he did, to triumph over death.

“After his resurrection,” continued my uncle, “there was a wonderful change in our Lord. Previously to this event, it was in power, and in wisdom, that he had shewed himself divine; but afterwards, every thing concerning him seems miraculous and mysterious. This first appears in the manner of his resurrection. He evidently had left the sepulchre before it was opened; the women who are named by St. Matthew, saw the angel appear, and roll away the stone; but he was already gone. ‘To Mary Magdalene,’ he said, ‘touch me not,’ as if there was that divine spirituality about his person which forbade the near approach of human frailty. And twice, when his disciples were assembled and the doors fastened, for fear of the Jews, he appeared in the midst of them; but to Him who had departed from the unopened sepulchre, it was no difficulty to enter a barricadoed house. From these, and other concurring circumstances, it is evident that his body had undergone a change, ‘the corruptible had put on incorruption;’ it was no longer the human body in its mortal state--it was the body raised to life and immortality, and united to the Deity.

“There was something about this divinity of his person, that was probably unsuitable to a more open display of himself to the public than he vouchsafed to make. He shewed himself, however, to all the Apostles; ‘he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once;’ in short, there were sufficient witnesses to attest his identity, and to publish the truth of his miraculous resurrection to all mankind. The Jewish people, in the rejection of our Lord, had filled the measure of their guilt; they had no further claim on him, and he no longer held his visible residence among them. When led to the cross, he had warned them that they would see him no more till they should be prepared to acknowledge his authority.

“The resurrection of our Saviour ensures resurrection to us also; it ensures to us a second life; but the complexion of that life depends on our faith, and our obedience in this. He ‘will change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body;’ but this transformation of our being requires a previous transformation of our mind.

“It is true that, as nothing has been distinctly communicated to us on the mode of existence after our resurrection, we can know but little of the precise nature of that future life; but there may be more analogy in it to our present state than we can now venture to affirm. There is some reason to believe that the employments of the good and wise, and the chief sources of their happiness in this world, have more or less relation to those which they are to enjoy in the world to come. The study of nature, the pursuit of knowledge, and the exercise of our faculties, when controlled by religion and virtue, may all, perhaps, assist in qualifying us for occupations and enjoyments in the ‘kingdom of the Father,’ infinitely more excellent and refined indeed, yet not entirely dissimilar.

“But whatever view we take of the mode of our future existence, it must revive and invigorate our minds to feel that the evidence of the resurrection of mankind is full and complete; and that we may, therefore, look forward, with perfect confidence, beyond these clouded scenes of mortality, to their final result. Let us now go, my children, and during the solemn service of this day, let us turn our eyes forward to that permanent happiness that we are taught to expect as the fruits of the discipline and vicissitudes experienced in the present life--and now, and always, let us keep our minds steadily and gratefully fixed on that glorious consummation of immortality, which our Lord has purchased for us, by his death and resurrection.”

_27th._--A new world of knowledge has opened to me, dear mamma, since my uncle began to teach us a little geology. I know it is but an outline, the slightest sketch, as he says, of the science; but it is sufficient to give a general idea of the strata near the surface of the globe; and the specimens of the different series have made all he told us doubly impressive. He has no beautiful minerals and crystals, as they are very expensive, and not so instructive as his rock collection. Indeed, he considers his children in all that he does; and these drawers were, I believe, arranged purposely for their benefit.

He shewed us this morning another class of substances imbedded in the secondary strata; these are the pebbles or broken fragments of rocks which they are often found to contain, and which have evidently belonged to strata older than themselves. For instance, new red sandstone frequently contains pieces of the carboniferous limestone belonging to the order next below it, as well as of many still older rocks: it is, in fact, nothing but a mass of sand and gravel cemented together; and which sand and gravel are only the remains, or _debris_ as they are called, of former rocks. My uncle says we may conclude, from this fact, that the rocks from which those fragments were derived must have been exposed to the action of violently agitated water, which tore off these masses, and rounded them by friction, before the newer rock, in which the fragments are now imbedded, was formed.--Another conclusion he draws from it, is this: these rocks were undoubtedly at some former period, beds of loose gravel; but loose gravel could never have been left by the water piled up in a highly inclined slope: we may therefore be sure, when new sandstone and other rocks of the same kind are found in nearly vertical strata, that this cannot have been their original situation, but that they must have been forced into their present position by some convulsion _after_ their consolidation. These consolidated gravel beds are called conglomerates, breccias, or pudding-stones, according to the materials of which they are composed.

He told us that the remains of marine animals, such as we saw the other day, are found in two-thirds of the rocks that compose the surface of the globe; and even on the highest summit of the Pyrenean mountains in Europe, and of the Andes in America. From this important fact, it is ascertained, without the possibility of doubt, that those continents have not only been covered by the ocean, but that they are formed of materials which once gradually collected at the bottom of that ocean.

A long conversation followed, but I cannot trust myself to write it; it principally turned on the wonderful changes that have taken place in the level of the ocean. What extraordinary causes could have lowered it to its present level, or else have raised up the land out of its bosom?--If the land has really subsided, what can have become of the enormous quantity of water which once flowed round the tops of the loftiest mountains? These questions, he said, have long engaged the attention of philosophers, and many ingenious theories and fanciful suppositions have been advanced to solve them. He slightly mentioned some of them; but merely to gratify our curiosity, strongly advising us to repress our anxiety about causes till we were in possession of facts.

_28th._--CANADA EXTRACTS.

“_Loghouse, April 5th._--You can scarcely conceive, when I saw your handwriting, the thrill of delight it gave me--your letter was a real feast--I could not sleep that night, from the fulness of my head and heart.

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“The snow, I am told, continues later this year than usual; in some places it was three feet deep, and is still deep, though it has gone off rapidly within the last fortnight, as it thaws a little every day, while the sun is hot.

“The buds are all swelling, and I have heard one or two new birds of late--but they stay up in the high trees, and I have not been able to see them. We have numbers of dear little tomtits, and some sparrows and crows. I used to despise all these at home, but here I delight in them, they are like old acquaintances. When we first came here, I heard an eagle very often, but he has deserted us.

“I am surprised at the nice green herbage that is under the snow; by which, and the decayed leaves, it has been preserved from the frost. The children bring in plants every day; the mosses and lichens are all quite new to me.

“The deep snow has much delayed the clearing of our land; next week we are to have five men here to cut down trees, _choppers_ as they are called; we have one at present, and it is astonishing with what dexterity and speed he fells these huge hemlock pines, nearly one hundred feet high. It is almost sublime to see them stoop their dark heads slowly, and then fall; very gradually at first, but soon increasing in rapidity--tearing off the neighbouring branches, shaking all the other trees, and coming down with a crash that makes the whole forest echo the sound. The Americans from the United States are employed to _chop_, as they are more expert than people from the old country, and can make the trees take the precise direction they choose in falling.

“We are much better off than most people are on first settling in the woods. There are some families here, who for the first six months had no food of any kind, except salt pork, for breakfast, dinner and supper, and without even bread; but we have good bread and peas, and sometimes turnips, with excellent milk. We brought barley and rice with us; and the arrow-root that you gave me is a great comfort to the children;--I never saw three more healthy creatures.

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“_May 2nd._--Last week we were busily engaged in burning the fallen trees, which covered the surface of the ground that we had cleared.