feeling is the same in man as in them, although, of course, the mode of manifesting it is different. We have shown the fallacy of the theory that parental love is life-enduring in man and very brief among the animals, and have seen that, in proportion to the duration of life, it is quite as brief among the savages as among the animals. And, again, we have seen where it has been lost and then restored, and also where it was never lost; where in animals, as in man, it has caused complete abnegation of self, the parents living for their children, and not for themselves, and where it has given strength to the weak and courage to the timid. Even the very fishes have been shown to be amenable to the same influences as man, and could we have carried our illustrations still lower down the scale we would have found the same influences existing among much humbler forms of animal existences. In conclusion, there is no resisting the fact that parental love, one of the highest and holiest feelings of which a loving and immortal soul can be capable, is shared equally by man and beast, according to their respective capacities.

LIFE PROGRESSIVE.

O one can doubt that the earth's crust, so far as it has been deciphered by man, presents us with a record, imperfect though it be, of the past. Whether, however, the known and admitted imperfections of its records, geological and palæontological, are sufficiently trustworthy to account satisfactorily for the lack of direct evidence recognizable in some modern hypotheses, may be a matter of individual opinion, but there can be little doubt that they are sufficiently extensive to throw the balance of evidence decisively in favor of some theory of continuity, as opposed to any theory of intermittent and occasional action, which some writers have strenuously and intelligently advocated. No marks of mighty and general convulsions of nature exist, as the seeming breaks which divide the grand series of stratified rocks into numerous isolated formations would indicate. They are simply indications of the imperfection of our knowledge. Science will never, in all probability, point to a complete series of deposits, or to a complete succession of life, which shall link one geological period to another. But that such deposits and such an unbroken succession must have existed at one time we may well feel sure, and stand ready to believe that nowhere in the long series of fossiliferous rocks has there been a total break, but that there has inevitably been a complete continuity of life, as well as a more or less complete continuity of sedimentation from the Laurentian period to the present day. One generation, speaking figuratively, hands on the lamp of life to the next, and each system of rocks is the direct offspring

of its predecessor in time. Though it is apparent that there has not been continuity in any given area, still the geological chain could not have been snapped at one point and taken up again at a totally different one. Hence we arrive at the conviction that in geology, as in other sciences, continuity is the fundamental law, and that the lines of demarcation between the great formations are but gaps in our own knowledge.

Through the study of fossils, as is well known, geologists have been led to the all-important generalization that the vast series of fossiliferous or sedimentary rocks may be separated into a number of definite groups or formations, each of which being characterized by its own organic remains, but not properly and strictly, it must be understood, by the occurrence therein of any one particular fossil. However, a formation may contain some particular fossil or fossils not occurring outside of that formation, thus enabling an observer to identify a given group with tolerable certainty; or, as very often happens, some particular stratum or subgroup of a series, may contain peculiar fossils, whereby its existence may be determined with considerable readiness in divers localities. Each great formation, let it be said, is properly characterized by the association of certain fossils, the predominance of certain families or orders, or by an assemblage of fossil remains that represent the life of the period during which the formation was deposited.

Fossils, then, not only enable us to determine the age of the deposits in which they are found, but they also further enable us to arrive at some very important conclusions respecting the manner in which the fossiliferous bed was deposited, and, consequently, to the condition of the particular region occupied by the bed at the period of its formation. Beds that contain the remains of animals, such as now inhabit rivers, we know to be fluviatile in their origin, and that at one time they must have either constituted actual river-beds, or been deposited by the overflowing of

ancient streams. But if the beds contain the remains of mollusks, minute crustaceans or fish, such as are found to-day in lakes, then we conclude that they are lacustrine, and were deposited beneath the waters of former lakes. And, lastly, if the remains of animals such as now people the oceans are to be met with in the beds, then we know that they are marine in origin, and that they are fragments of an old sea-bottom. On the whole, the conditions under which a bed was deposited, whether in a shallow sea, in the immediate vicinity of a coast-line, or in deep water, can often be determined with considerable accuracy from the nature of the relics of the organisms which they contain. But we have thus far been dealing with the remains of aquatic animals. When, however, we consider the remains of aerial and terrestrial animals, or of plants, the determination of the conditions of deposition is not made out with such an absolute certainty. Remains of land-animals would, of course, occur in sub-aerial deposits, that is, in beds, like blown sand, accumulated upon the land, but the most of such remains of such animals are found in deposits which have been laid down in water, and hence their present position is due to the fact that their former owners were either drowned in rivers or lakes, or borne out to sea by water-channels. Animals possessed of the power of flight might also similarly find their way into aqueous deposits, but, when it is remembered that many birds and mammals habitually spent a great part of their time in the water, it is not to be wondered at that they should present themselves as fossils in sedimentary rocks. Even plants, such as have undoubtedly grown upon land, do not prove that the bed in which they are found was formed on land, for many of their remains are extraneous to the bed in which they now occur, having reached their present site by falling into lakes or rivers, or by being carried out to sea by floods or gales of winds. Still, there are many cases which obviously show that plants have grown on the very spot where we now find

them. The great coal-fields of the Carboniferous Age, it is now generally conceded, are the result of the growth in situ of the plants which compose coal, as well as that they grew on vast marshy or partially submerged tracts of level alluvial land.

While fossils enable us in many cases to arrive at important conclusions as to the climate of the period in which they lived, yet it is only in the case of marine fossils, which constitute the majority of such remains, that we acquire such knowledge, but it is mostly the temperature of the sea which can thus be determined. However, let it be remembered that, owing to the existence of heated currents, the marine climate of a designated area does not necessarily imply a correspondingly warm climate in the adjoining land, for land-climates can only be determined by the relics of landanimals or land-plants, and these are comparatively rare as fossils. But all conclusions on this head are really based upon the existing distribution of vegetable and animal life. upon the globe, and are therefore liable to be vitiated by the considerations that no certainty exists that the habits and requirements of an extinct animal were exactly similar to those of its nearest living relative; that far back in time groups of organisms, so unlike anything we know at the present day, are met with, which render all conjectures of climate based upon their supposed habits more or less uncertain and unsafe; that in the case of marine animals we are as yet very far from knowing the precise limits of distribution of many species within our present seas as to render conclusions drawn from living forms in relation to extinct species unsatisfactory and, probably, incorrect; and, finally, that the distribution of animals to-day, is certainly dependent on other conditions than climate alone, the causes limiting the range of given animals being assuredly such as belong to the existing order of things, and are different from what they were in former times, not necessarily because the climate has changed, but because of the alteration of other