[113] Revue des Deux Mondes.
[114] “Ossements fossiles. Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe.”
[115] Lyell’s “Elements of Geology,” p. 175.
[116] It is told of a former distinguished and witty member of the Geological Society that, having obtained possession of the rooms on a certain day, when there was to be a general meeting, he decorated its walls with a series of cartoons, in which the parts of the members were strangely reversed. In one cartoon Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri were occupied with the skeleton of Homo sapiens; in another, a party of Crustaceans were occupied with a cranium suspiciously like the same species; while in a third, a party of Pterichthys were about to dine on a biped with a suspicious resemblance to a certain well-conditioned F.G.S. of the day.
[117] “Époques de la Nature,” vol. xii., pp. 322-325. 18mo. Paris, 1778.
EPILOGUE.
Having considered the past history of the globe, we may now be permitted to bestow a glance upon the future which awaits it.
Can the actual state of the earth be considered as definitive? The revolutions which have fashioned its surface, and produced the Alps in Europe, Mount Ararat in Asia, the Cordilleras in the New World—are they to be the last? In a word, will the terrestrial sphere for ever preserve the form under which we know it—as it has been, so to speak, impressed on our memories by the maps of the geographers?