This was the era of gigantic vegetable
growth, and it had its uses; for it was preparing the way for higher
and more complicated existences. As the gases that surrounded the
earth became consolidated into vegetation, as this stupendous growth
decomposed the noxious atmosphere, drawing from it its grosser
particles and working them up into solid matter, extracting from it
what was fatal to animal life, this earth entered upon another era of
its progress.
"Animal life made its appearance. It was weak and feeble at first, but
a step removed from vegetable matter. The molusca, the polypi, and the
rudest forms of fishes, were, beyond question, the first of living
things. Science demonstrates that the water brought forth the first
creations endowed with animal vitality. How long this era continued no
man can tell. Then came the amphibise, gigantic animals of the lizard
kind; the sauruses, that could reach with their long necks and
ponderous jaws across a street and pick up a man, if street and man
there had been. Then came land animals, monstrous in growth, by the
side of which the elephant dwindles to the diminutive stature of the
dormouse. In all these advances, was a succession of steps, mounting
higher and higher, in complication of structure, each more perfect in
organism than its predecessor.
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