It is curious, we say, to think that everything now on the earth or
composing its substance was present, though in far different form, at
the beginning,--that the Almighty gathered together in this part of
the universe all the materials out of which to create all the forms of
things which it was his pleasure to evolve here through all time,--that
in that nebulous mass were revolving, not only the gases which were at
last to combine in various manners and proportions to form the rocky
crust and the watery investment of the earth, but that in that dense and
noisome cloud floated also the elements of all the beautiful objects
that furnish the daily enchantments of life. Flowers and trees, birds
and fishes, locusts and mastodons, all things, from the tiniest
animalcule to man, were there, unmodelled, not even in embryo,--their
separate existences then only in the mind of God. There, Christian and
Saracen, Jew and Gentile, Caucasian and Negro, Hindoo and Pariah, all
the now heterogeneous natures which are as oil and water, were blended
in one common vapor.

Finally the condensation of all the gaseous elements began, and the
aëriform masses became liquid, and the waters,--what mineral waters
they were, when they were saturated with granite and marble, diamonds,
rubies, arsenic, and iron!--thus deposited by the vapor, left a gas
above them light enough to bear some faint resemblance to our air.
Still this atmosphere was surcharged with vapors which no lungs could
tolerate, whether of man or reptile; and other steps must be taken to
clear it of its unwholesome properties. Then did the Almighty will
introduce, one after another, the germs of plants,--first of all, the
lower orders, the ferns, which seek the shade, and the lichens, which
grow in damp and dark recesses, mosses, which cling to bare rocks,
living almost on air and water alone,--everything which needed not