CHAPTER III

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THE OOLITIC OR JURASSIC SYSTEM—AGE OF REPTILES.

When one is about to travel, or to undertake a journey of any distance from the daily beat of home, it is very seldom indeed that he puts into his pocket a book of science. Voyages, travels, a review at most, or the newest novel, may fill up a spare place in the portmanteau: anything that requires study, or would draw upon the reflective faculties, can be no fitting companion for the occasion, with at least nine-tenths of our moving public.

If the preceding pages have been perused with any attention at all, it is to be hoped that other things will be considered as worthy of a passing glance, as sure we are they cannot fail to be replete with lessons of instructive wisdom. On the ground of mere ephemeral curiosities by the way, geological matters claim consideration. They are exhaustless, too, and ever varying as you proceed. When you imagine that the last mountain rock or quarry contained the whole catalogue of Natural History, and showed you more than Goldsmith, or Buffon, you find that over the next ridge, or in the neighboring field, there are new subjects for study, and still renewing matters for wonder.

If you have taken up your abode for the night at classic Rugby, at sporting Melton-mowbray, or among the academic bowers of Oxford, there are objects all around, in every hill-side, ravine, or railway section, to fill you at once with admiration and astonishment. Go, inquire of that rock. It is the _lias limestone_; beyond it, and at no great distance, lies the _oolite_; and there, in the immediate vicinity of both, you have the _Stonesfield slate_. We invite you to examine any one of these common-place looking stones; and not in Gulliver, not in the history of the Knight of La Mancha, not in all the Mysteries of Udolpho, not in the Romance of the Forest whose harmonious periods so charmed our youth, will you find anything to compare with the marvels therein to be disclosed. The machinery of a tale may require the aid of giants and genii, but here is “truth without fiction,” more startling, marvelous, and so beyond the bounds of nature as now felt and seen, that the most daring fancy is utterly outstripped in its loftiest flights into the regions of the ideal. The series of beds which constitute the mineral features of this extensive district contains the full development of the reptilian type to which we were introduced in the last chapter. Animals there are in these rocks, with forms and features, so fantastic, and apparently disproportioned, that the tales of the most unscrupulous traveler would suffer in comparison. And in truth, there is no page in the book of nature—none, certainly, in all the works of man—so fraught with wonders, or remarkable for stirring incident, as the epoch of animal life whose history is there inscribed.

I. THE NATURE OF THE ROCKS. The oolitic or Jurassic system, like that of the new red sandstone, comprises the subdivisions of two well-marked natural groups, in which the lias or lower series is included. In point of geographical range, the oolite formation is extensively distributed over the surface of the globe; in mineral character it is varied in every possible degree of texture and composition; in geognostic arrangement there are intercalations, without end, of marine and terrestrial detritus; the organic remains are in the greatest profusion, both as to diversity of type and increase of new creations; and, locally, such has been the appreciation of its various members, that there is scarcely a town or parish in the south-eastern part of England, that has not received from or given habitations and name to, some one of its numerous subdivisions.

Resting upon the triassic formation, there are bands of lias shales, limestones, sandy and ferruginous strata, and upper shales, including nodular concretions and beds of limestone. This series is distributed over the counties of York, Northampton, Somerset, and Dorset. The next are the lower oolites, which comprise an extensive series of calcareous, concretionary sands and sandstones, limestone, thin seams of coal and ligneous clays, and the Cornbrash limestone, which in many localities is a mere aggregation of shells and other marine exuviæ. The Stonesfield slate, the Forest marble, and the Fuller’s earth beds, are included in the group, ranging along the Yorkshire coast, through Northampton, Oxford, and Gloucester shires; and in Scotland we have their equivalents in the Brora coal and oolitic limestone of Sutherlandshire, Skye, and the adjacent islands. The middle oolite succeeds, which includes the Oxford clay, the Kelloway rock, and the coral-rag, all more or less distinguished by their profusion and peculiarity of fossils, chiefly shells, echini, and corals. The whole formation terminates in two well known deposits, the Kimmeridge clay and Portland oolite, with its bands of green and red sands, layers of chert and drift-wood. This group prevails in Oxfordshire, Berks, Wilts, Bucks, and the Isle of Portland; the matrix of fossilized reptilia, fishes, and cycadeous plants.

The term OOLITE or roestone, as applied to the whole of the groups enumerated above, is derived from the resemblance between the small rounded grains of which the limestones are generally composed, and the roe of a fish. The Jura mountains, which divide France from Switzerland, consist mainly of these deposits, and hence Jurassic—the _Terrains Jurrassiques_ of continental geologists. The word lias is simply a corruption of liers (layers), and has from time immemorial been applied to the rocks of this group. Their relation and order of superposition are fully brought out along the sections of the Great Western Railway from London to Bath. The Birmingham line from Derby by Rugby to the metropolis intersects nearly every member of the series, until they are covered about Wallingford by the chalk.

When one looks at these innumerable bands of rock, and the great diversity of earthy matter of which they are composed, the mind becomes utterly overwhelmed by the rapidity and vastness of the changes which, during this epoch, occurred upon the surface of the globe. A turbid, and often agitated, condition of the waters in which they were deposited is very clearly indicated. The animals of the period were manifestly of a class peculiarly adapted to the impregnated element, the slimy banks, and shallows which prevailed. The flora was abundant, of a kind, and produced in circumstances, favorable for the formation of a lignite coal. The spasmodic action which prevailed after the deposition of the carboniferous beds had not entirely subsided at the Permian period. The change was of too violent a kind to have been brought about without great internal, as well as external, commotion. We find, accordingly, in most districts, that the rocks of this class are upturned and disrupted. The detritus of the new red sandstone and magnesian limestone, thereby occasioned, would go to form new land during the submergence of such portions of the surface as were retained beneath the waters. The oscillations were numerous and frequent, corresponding with the aggregate of beds which compose the system; while the quality and arrangement of the sediment point to changes and alterations in sea-levels, river courses, land boundaries, estuaries, the size and distribution of the basins into which the alluvia were transported. The geographic extent, combined with the frequently insulated position of the oolitic series, clearly demonstrates a vast alteration in the bed of the ocean, as well as in the ridges and elevations which gave diversity to the land. The oolites, in fact, constitute vast calcareous reefs, raised upon the inverted strata of the older formations, which formed the cliffs and headlands of a sea swarming with lizards and crocodilians, and over whose thick umbrageous banks roamed the flying pterodactyle, watching or perhaps escaping from, the singular saurians that reposed in the thickets beneath. The substitution of the pyritous clays for the saliferous marls; the dark argillaceous oolites and blue mottled lias for the yellow crystalline dolomite, is in harmony and keeping with the plants and animals which now, for the first time, sprang into existence.

II. THE ORGANIC REMAINS are very abundant, and in both plants and animals there are various new kinds. Of the former are the cycadeæ, allied to the existing pine-apple; also the lilaceæ, and some other undescribed genera. With regard to animals, this has been emphatically called “the age of reptiles,” along with which there are new families of fishes, crustacea, mollusca, and corals. The warm-blooded animals now for the first time appear, of which there are two genera, the _Amphitherium_ and _Phascolotherium_, found in the Stonesfield slate near Oxford, and considered, by analogy of structure, to be allied to the marsupials that inhabit the Australian continent. The same interesting locality has furnished two new genera of insects, the _Prionus Ooliticus_ and _Coccinella Wittsii_; in the lias, of different places, eleven genera and species have been discovered, but of which only wings and fragments have been obtained. A perfect specimen of this order has recently been found, by the Rev. P. B. Brodie, in the upper lias, near Cheltenham, resembling the genus _diplax_; but so shattered in the head, that its precise character cannot be determined. The reptilians supply alike new terrestrial and marine tortoises and turtles—lizards, whose arms and legs were provided with a filmy membrane, like bats, to enable them to fly—amphibious saurians, and water saurians unlike anything now in existence.

Contrast this catalogue with the few organic remains to be met with in the preceding period, and ask what called such a newly-inhabited world into being? The face of nature, so remarkably elaborated out of the waste and decay of these old stony materials, is moving all over with life—replenished, so far as yet discovered, with seventy-five generic and specific forms of new vegetation—a hundred and ten new forms of hard-working corallines—seven hundred and thirteen genera and species of the shelly tribes, from the simplest to the most complicated of the chambered orders—a hundred and sixty distinct races of fishes, placoids and ganoids—three varieties of the most strangely constructed mammalian quadrupeds, with thirteen kinds of insects to titillate and keep them in

## action—and all this array of organic life moving side by side with forty

families of gigantic reptiles, herbivorous and carnivorous, creeping, swimming, and flying! The wonders of art have nothing to compare with this. The structure of a blade of grass will not suffer an atheist to live. During the six thousand years of man’s existence, one new living thing, of any order or type, has not been called into being. Astronomy is daily adding to her achievements, and penetrating farther among the systems of the universe; but the nebular theory of creation is gone, and the new-world germs will not expand at its fanciful bidding. Geology nobly bears testimony in every page to the rule of one supreme intelligent Creator—an exuberance of life and forms which announces the authoritative interposition of Him

“Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect; Who calls for things that are not—and they come.”

And the mandate goes forth, in that awful simplicity of OMNIPOTENCE, which learning cannot mystify nor ignorance overlook.

This formation abounds in the remains of radiata, mollusca, and crustacea,—all of them differing specifically from those of the older secondary strata. The gigantic _crinoidea_ of the carboniferous age have disappeared, succeeded only by a few dwarfish specimens of the _apiocrinite_ and pentacrinite, while the _ammonites_ mark an increase of nearly two hundred species, preserved in the most perfect state in the shales and limestones of the lias and oolite.

[Illustration: 1. Ammonites obtusus; 2. Section of Ammonites obtusus, showing the interior chambers and siphuncle; 3. Ammonites nodosus.]

The term Ammonite has been bestowed upon this remarkable shell-fish from its fancied resemblance to the curved horn on the head of the statue of Jupiter-Ammon. The spiral form of the shell is divided into several chambers or compartments, all of which are connected by means of an interior tube or siphuncle. It belongs to the order of Cephalopoda, among which are included ancyloceros, belemnites, nautilus, orthoceratite, and other many-chambered shells. Like the nautilus, the ammonite was gifted with a singular apparatus by which it could pursue its instincts either at the bottom or on the surface of the element in which it lived. The organs of motion were arranged round the head (hence the name _cephalopoda_); and, by the nicely adaptive arrangements of nature, the outer chamber of the shell was capable of retaining the entire body of the animal, while the interior chambers were hollow, thereby rendering the whole structure of nearly the same specific gravity with the waters in which it moved. An elastic tube passing through the siphuncle connected the cavity of the heart with the extremity of the shell, which enabled the animal to contract or expand itself as its exigencies required. Being filled with a dense fluid, excreted by the glandular organs, the creature, when alarmed or wishing to descend, withdrew itself within the outer chamber, whereby the contraction of the tube forced the fluid from the heart into the siphuncle, and increasing the gravity enabled it to descend to the bottom. Upon a reversal of the process—the simple projection of the arms of the head, and the consequent expansion of the body—the ammonite rose with equal facility to the surface, disporting itself at will in its native element. With a view to resist the pressure, when at the bottom, a provision was made by means of the _arch-form_ in the structure of the shell; and, additionally, by the insertion of a series of transverse ribs, which comprise all the mechanical contrivances for giving strength and solidity which are sought by the divisions and subdivisions in the vaulted roofs of our Gothic architecture. The geographical distribution of the ammonite partakes of the universality so marked in the vegetable economy of the carboniferous age, the same species even being common to Europe, Asia, North and South America; and always, along with all its numerous congeners, manifesting the most striking examples of that adaptation of means to ends which prevails in every department of creation.

We shall now select a few details of the more remarkable of the reptilian types of this period, referring the reader to the ample and graphic descriptions of Buckland, Conybeare, Mantell, Phillips, and more especially to the Reports of Professor Owen, in the volumes published by the British Association in 1840-’1.

[Illustration: Ichthyosaurus communis.]

1. The first genus to be noticed is termed the Ichthyosaurus, which partakes at once of the characters of crocodiles, lizards, and fishes. So lavish has nature been in providing for the accommodation and wants of this anomalous creature, that to the paddles of a whale, is added the sternum of an _ornithorhynchus_; the head of a lizard is joined to the vertebræ of a fish; and the snout of a porpoise is combined with the jaws and teeth of a crocodile. The magnitude of the eye is prodigious, and the jaws, sometimes exceeding six feet in length, are studded with an apparatus of teeth, amounting in some instances, to a hundred and eighty. “From the quantity of light admitted in consequence of the prodigious size of the eye,” says Dr. Buckland, “it must have possessed very great powers of vision: we have also evidence that it had both microscopic and telescopic properties. We find on the front of the orbital cavity, in which this eye was lodged,”—a cavity sometimes fourteen inches in diameter,—“a circular series of petrified thin bony plates, ranged round a central aperture, where once was placed the pupil; the form and thickness of each of these plates very much resembles that of the scales of the artichoke. It also tends to associate the animal in which it existed, with the family of lizards, and exclude it from that of fishes.” These bony plates gave strength to the surface of the eye-ball, which required protection above and below, from the dashing of the waves when it reared its head to the storm, and from the pressure of deep water when it scoured the bottom. The nostrils, it would seem, were placed so close to the anterior angle of the eye, as to render it impossible to breathe without raising the organs of sight to the surface of the water. An ocean, peopled with such monsters! Imagine so many eyes, larger than a man’s head studding its surface, and illuminating, as with fire-balls, their terrific jaws, glaring out from the briny flood; and what a scene to gaze upon, so different from all that now covers these rich alluvial plains!

[Illustration: Plesiosaurus.]

2. The Plesiosaurus is allied in some respects to the former, but in other points differs so materially, and possesses characters so strange, as to claim for it a degree of monstrosity unparalleled, even amid the ruins of the old world. Here we have the union of the serpent and chameleon, with a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped. The mechanism of the lungs and ribs is peculiar, showing that the animal must have breathed with such force and rapidity, as to have rendered the color of the skin changeable, like the chameleon or dying dolphin. The neck bore a resemblance to that of the swan; the feet and motions were allied to those of the turtle; and, from the varied intensity of its inspirations, it is conjectured that the creature inhabited the shallow pools and marshy waters along the coast. The body would thus be concealed among the rank vegetable aquatics; while, with its long flexible neck, it would be prepared suddenly to pounce upon its prey. Mr. Conybeare compares the Plesiosaurus to a turtle stripped of its shell; and the ribs, being connected by transverse abdominal processes, present a close analogy to those of the chameleon. Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri have been found in the secondary strata, from the lias to the chalk inclusive; of the former, twelve species are known and described, and nearly twenty of the latter. The most remarkable of the enalio-saurii or marine reptiles, is the Plesiosaurus-dolichodeirus, discovered in the lias of Lyme-Regis, and which is fertile in the remains of all the animals of that remote and wonder-producing epoch.

[Illustration: Pterodactyle.]

3. Another example, taken from the lias, is of its kind even more startling than either of the preceding. This consists of the remains of an animal called the Pterodactyle, or flying reptile, which, more than anything ever conceived or bred in poet’s brain, resembles what Milton must have intended, when to the great arch-fiend he gave a form and flexibility of body, that

“Swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.”

Certainly each and one of all these evolutions the Pterodactyle could execute, and he was amply provided with the fitting instruments to perform them. This animal possessed a head intermediate betwixt that of a bird and a reptile, which in both cases is comparatively small, and offering the least resistance to the medium through which it passed, in quest whether of pleasure or subsistence. The hands were of the most prehensile character, adapted by the claws attached at once to fix and firmly grasp its prey, and, when needed for pursuit, to swing itself squirrel-like from branch to branch, and from tree to tree. The wings resembled those of the bat, but in length and size allied to nothing in existing nature, and finding their match only among the dragons of romance. Then, as to feet and limbs, these were of such a construction as to allow the animal safely to repose after its toils in a standing position on the ground, or to perch on trees, or to climb on rocks, or disport from cliff to cliff. The eyes were large; the wings terminated in fingers, from which projected long hooks; the beak was furnished with about sixty sharp piercing teeth. No wonder that naturalists were astonished at such heterogenous combinations, as they rose upon their sight—

“That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth; And yet are on’t;”

and knew not whether to ascribe them to the air, or the earth, or the domain of waters. But, in the hands of Cuvier, the entire structure and relations of the several parts of the framework have been explained and developed; the libellulæ and other insects on which they fed have been detected in the same rocks with their own relics; and out of that apparent mass of inconsistencies and contradictions, the genius of the skillful anatomist has produced one of the most striking examples of the harmony that pervades all nature, that has been extended through all ages, and that manifests the bounteous care of the common Creator in adapting all living things, each after its kind, to the conditions of its existence.

4. The Stonesfield strata belong to the lower division of the great oolite. The slate of the district has been long known and prized for roofing purposes. The village of Stonesfield lies about twelve miles to the north-west of Oxford, beautifully situated on the brow of a valley, both sides of which have been deeply excavated for the extraction of the slate. Woodstock and Blenheim are both in the vicinity, neither of whose remarkable heroes ever dreamed of the mighty wars, waged in a far distant age from their own, by the fierce assailants whose remains have now been disturbed by these operations. Here are abundant the remains of palms, aborescent ferns, seed-vessels, leaves, stems of several genera of coniferæ, and traces of reeds and grasses. Wings and their cases, the _elytra_ of beetles, and other relics of insects, are mingled with the teeth, scales, fin-bones, rays of fishes, in the greatest profusion. And here, on the site of this ancient menagerie or battle-field, are the only known vestiges of mammalian animals in the secondary formations. One set of these remains resembles the Wombat, a marsupial didelphys of New South Wales; the other remains indicate a small insectivorous mammal, the Amphitherium, with thirty teeth in the lower jaw. Australia, therefore, supposed to furnish evidence of an entirely new order of things, has been long anticipated in all its types of plants and animals by the denizens of our own land—our waters swarming with cestraceonts, trigoniæ, and terebratulæ—and our fields clothed with araucariæ and cycadeous plants—when perhaps but little of that continent rose above the waters.

5. The DINOSAURIA constitute a tribe or sub-order of the lacertians, characterized by the large development of the sacrum, the dorsal vertebræ, the bones of the extremities, which are all provided with large medullary cavities. Of this tribe there are three well established genera—the Megalosaurus, the Hylæosaurus, and the Iguanodon. These were the gigantic crocodile lizards of the dry land, whose peculiarities of osteological structure distinguish them as clearly from the modern terrestrial and amphibious sauria, as the opposite modifications for an aquatic life, characterize the extinct enaliosauria, or marine lizards. The Dinosaurians belong properly to the Wealden fresh water formations, which may be regarded as the true habitat of this order of terrestrial fossil reptiles.

The Megalosaurus was first described by Cuvier, and the family determined; he calculated the dimensions of the animal at from forty to fifty feet in length. Professor Owen, from better preserved specimens, has reduced it to thirty feet long: the head is five feet, the length of trunk with sacrum thirteen feet, and the tail about the same, allowing the Megalosaur to have had the same number of caudal vertebræ as the crocodile. The sacrum consisted of five anchylosed vertebræ, new in saurian anatomy: the hind-legs measure two yards, a metatarsal bone thirteen inches; the teeth are of corresponding dimensions, and curve backward in the form of a pruning-knife. The structure of the jaw indicates a long projecting snout, while the curvature of the teeth fitted them to retain like barbs the prey which they had once penetrated. All the organs of the monster declare the Megalosaur to have been a land animal, of carnivorous propensities, and in all probability performed, as headsman the same office upon the smaller herd of reptiles, sometimes making a snatch at a Plesiosaur, as both in turn did upon fishes and crustaceans. The sport of an Indian jungle is child’s play compared to the onslaught of these grim kings amidst their ancient preserves. The remains occur in the deposits at Malton in Yorkshire, Cuckfield in Sussex, Bath, the Purbeck limestone, Tilgate Forest, and the Wealden.

The next genus of the land reptiles was remarkable for the size of the horny plates by which the body was protected. This is the Hylæosaurus—that is, forest-reptile—about twenty-five feet long, and covered with a series of large, flat, and pointed bones. These vary in length from five to seventeen inches, and are from three to seven and a half inches in breadth. In addition, as showing the kind of warfare to which he was exposed, a ridge of thick thorny scales pass along the back, and form an enormous dermal fringe, like the spines on the back of the living iguana tribes. The skeleton of the Hylæosaur has been found nearly entire, and all the parts in almost natural juxtaposition. The Wealden of Tilgate Forest, the deposits at Bolney and Battle of the same formation, contain the remains in considerable abundance.

What shall be said of the next figure that crosses the tragic stage, during this age of tyrant prodigies? The Iguanodon—a gigantic herbivorous lizard—is related to a family of harmless creatures (_Iguana_), which swarm in the West Indies, and in all the tropical forests of America, in certain peculiarities of the teeth greatly differing from those of other reptiles. The largest of living Iguanas, do not exceed five feet in length: the extinct genus attained a longitude of upward of twenty-eight to thirty feet. The caudal member was about thirteen, head three, trunk with sacrum twelve, and the girth of the body about fifteen feet. The teeth resemble the teeth of the rhinoceros as to bulk and general appearance, and, consisting as they do of incisors and molars, were recognized to belong to the order of herbivorous quadrupeds. The thigh-bone exceeds that of the largest-sized elephant, being from four to five feet in height, and presenting a circumference of nearly two feet in its smallest part. This animal, at its first discovery, was supposed to have attained the exaggerated proportions of nearly a hundred feet in length. But even under the reduced dimensions and more accurate deductions of Professor Owen, confirmed by those of Dr. Mantell, there is still size sufficient, as well as peculiarities of structure, to lead us to regard it as one of the wonders of geology. One femur of a recently-discovered Iguanodon is twenty-seven inches in circumference, and must have been nearly five feet in length; and a tibia, found with the same, is four feet long. Dr. Melville has established the important physiological fact, that the cervical and anterior dorsal vertebræ were convexo-concave,—that is, convex in front and concave behind, as in the existing pachyderms; while the reverse form, the concavo-convex, predominates in the existing crocodilians and lizards. It is farther established, that in the Iguanodon, as in many fossil and recent reptiles, the anterior extremities were much shorter and less bulky than the posterior. As in the existing family, so in the extinct, the huge body was ornamented with a horn of bone which projected from the nose. This nasal organ seems to have been worn more for decoration than for use; unless, perhaps, to assist in perforating its way through the thickets of vegetation on which it subsisted, to push aside an unwelcome intruder upon his pasturage, or as a mere set-off against the unprecedented length of tail. Imagine a herd of these monsters feeding in a prairie—the denizens of a period when all things partook of the gigantic! “The concurrence of peculiarities so remarkable,” says Buckland, “as the union of this nasal horn with a mode of dentition of which there is no example, except in the Iguanas, affords one of the many proofs of the universality of the laws of co-existence, which prevailed no less constantly throughout the extinct genera and species of the fossil world, than they do among the living members of the animal kingdom.” Professor Owen writes—“No reptile now exists which combines a complicated and thecodont dentition with limbs so proportionally large and strong, having such well-developed marrow-bones, and sustaining the weight of the trunk by _sychondrosis_ or _anchylosis_ to so long and complicated a sacrum, as in the order _Dinosauria_. The Megalosaurus and Iguanodons, rejoicing in these undeniably most perfect modifications of the reptilian type, attained the greatest bulk, and must have played the most conspicuous parts, in their respective characters as devourers of animals and feeders upon vegetables, that this earth has ever witnessed in oviparous and cold-blooded creatures. They were as superior in organization and in bulk to the crocodiles that preceded them as to those which came after them.”

6. We close our enumeration of these fossils by simply stating, that the CROCODILIANS also flourished at this period. The living species are twelve in number, all remarkable for the size of their mouth, and their exuberant abundance of teeth. The extinct species were nearly as numerous, but all more allied to the gavials of New Holland than to the other members of the family. They seem chiefly to have subsisted on fishes, while their modern congeners are furnished with powers which enable them to prey upon mammalia and other quadrupeds. When Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury—the old haunt of all these monsters—adopted the title “leviathan” for his political and anti-Christian views, he did it more in derision of the name than from any belief that such things as the term represents had ever or could ever have existed “in rerum natura.” Persons, even now, to whom the subject is presented for the first time, will turn with aversion from its details under the influence of the very opposite feelings from those of the infidel metaphysician. The evidence of facts however, will yield neither to prejudices nor to theories. And, while we dream not of representing the patriarch of Uz as drawing his inferences from geology, still his mind was alive to convictions of the grandeur and diversity of the works of creation—to a sense of his own ignorance—and filled at the same time with awe and veneration at the unsearchable wisdom of the ways of Providence. “STAND STILL AND CONSIDER THE WONDROUS WORKS OF GOD. HAST THOU ENTERED INTO THE SPRINGS OF THE SEA? HAST THOU PERCEIVED THE BREADTH OF THE EARTH? DECLARE, IF THOU KNOWEST IT ALL.”

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