Transcribe Notice of the Ward cabinets...the University of Rochester (1863)

                                OPINIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MEN.                                   31

over "chaos and old night.: For cycles granite was the only rock; though reefs were rising to the water's edge through the ceaseless labors of those Adamites of the animal kingdom; beautiful stone-flowers blossomed on the bottom of the ocean; lazy worms crawled on the mud of newly-made shores; myriads of armor-clad trilobites, with their hundred eyes, floated on their backs; and savage cephalopods shot like arrows through the vasty deep. Stepping across this dark millennium, we find ourselves on the old red sandstone of Hugh Miller, alongside his favorite holotychius, celpalaspis and pterichthys. It was the period when ganoidal fishes were thrown into the world with amazing prodigality; so here we have the fins and teeth, scales and skeletons of awkward finny tribes - buckler-headed, winged and reptilian - then the highest type of living creatures. Another stride as if into a coal-pit, and we are in the dingy carboniferous era. We are surrounded with the unmistakable relics of the rank, flowerless vegetation which flourished under the warm, steaming atmosphere of the third day of creation. Never before, nor since, did our planet bear such splendid flora. In walking among their ruins, the visitor feels as if he had been set down amid the giant and elaborate columns of Baalbec. Dry land had appeared when these lofty trees stood bolt upright and waved their luxuriant branches in the passing breeze; but it was in the shape of islands, and death-like silence hung over the deep tangled forest; not the hum of an insect, nor a footfall was heard around the globe.

Passing another boundary, we enter a new world - the realm of strange, misproportioned sea-monsters and creeping things - "creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth." The cabinet is very rich in trias and lias fauna. Here, on a slab 7 feet long, are the original tracks of the gigantic labrythinodon - half crocodile, half frog; and close by, its head armed with teeth. There are the relics of an ichthyosaurus - a reptilian whale mounted on paddles - whose entire length, judging from the head (over 5 feet long), vertebrae and paddles, must have been 60 feet. There, too, with a multitude of coprolites, is a family of five on unbroken slabs. Still more prominent and intensely interesting are the three-toed footprints from the banks of the Connecticut which tell us of a time when gigantic birds stalked over New England - a match for the rocs of Sinbad the Sailor. In this section, also, are 400 or 500 species of ammonites, with an allied group of nautilites with their