which would have towered above the tallest trees of our forests. But in proportion to the rapidity of their growth was the brevity of their life; for these were the days of earthquakes and terrestrial convulsions. Probably no day elapsed without some earthquake or volcanic eruption.
The light of day was dull and obscured. Masses of opaque matter floated through the atmosphere as thickly as dust specks float through a ray of sunlight in a darkened room.[1] The hot air, thick and dull, hung a listless mist over the face of the earth, which was even then almost without form and void. When the sun went down, dense darkness covered the earth. There was no lesser light to rule the night; dim twinklings in the far distance, hardly piercing the pall which wrapped our planet, were the only contrasts to the Egyptian blackness of the dark hours.
But the internal fires which sprung from the vitals of the earth almost supplied the want of a nocturnal luminary. It is probable that there were but few spots on the globe which were out of view of some flaming volcano. We count the active volcanoes by integers. When we have enumerated Etna, Vesuvius, Hecla, Jorullo, Colime, and one or two others, we have reached the end of our list. In the days of Homer the volcanoes were counted by scores; in the carboniferous age they may have, must have, flourished by hundreds and thousands. That vast incandescent mass, of which the crust only bad cooled, kept boiling op every few hours, and furiously pouring out the vials of its wrath upon an earth inhabited by transitory creatures. Go where the traveller may, he will still find traces of this terrible age. That tell-tale rock—"the trap"—is peculiar to no meridian; and from the Hudson's Bay territories nearly to Cape Magellan, from Spitzbergen to Borneo, either this, or some mountain range of volcanic origin, here with scoriæ disseminated through the more regular formations, there with copper or gold held in a native state in half-decayed quartz, tell a very legible story of the time when all the component parts of the earth were in a fluid state, and were thrown off by the boiling wags beneath as a kettle throws off froth and scum.
There came a day when the under crust could no longer bear the weight of the mass which, after being thrown off daily, returned, by the force of gravitation, to the surface of its parent. A time came when the
- ↑ For an account of the singular views which the ancients had entertained on this subject, see " The Theology of the Phoenicians," by Sanchoniatho, who flourished about the time of the Trojan war. Published in a collection of Ancient Fragments, New York. 1835.
