There is nothing more drear, monstrous, wild, dark, and lonely in the
descriptions of the mythologic than of the scientific page. What more
wild and drear is there, even in Indian cosmogonic fable, than that
strange carbonigenous era of the globe, whose deposits, in the shape of
petrified forests, now keep us warm and cook our food, and whose relics
and souvenirs are pressed between the stone leaves of the secondary
rock for preservation by the Omnipotent Herbalist? Land and water were
then distinguishable,--but as yet there was no terrestrial animal,
nothing organic but radiata and molluscs, holly-footed and head-footed,
and other aquatic monstrosities, mailed, plated, and buckler-headed,
casting the shovel-nosed shark of the present Cosmos entirely into the
shade, in point of horned, toothed, and serrated horrors. These
amorphous creatures glided about in the seas, and vast sea-worms, or
centipedal asps, the parents of modern krakens and sea-serpents,
doubtless, accompanied them. There stood that unfinished world reeking
with charcoal fumes, its soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation
efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic
atmosphere. Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there
motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid
reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes
were not,--nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending,
as from a vast charcoal brazier.
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