Musa Burschicosa :: :: University of Virginia Library

I'll sing you a ditty that needs no apology—
Attend, and keep watch in the gates of your ears!—
Of the famous new science which men call Geology,
And gods call the story of millions of years.
Millions, millions—did I say millions?
Billions and trillions are more like the fact!
Millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions,
Make the long sum of creation exact!

Confusion and Chaos, with wavering pinion,
First swayed o'er the weltering ferment of things,
When all over all held alternate dominion,
And the slaves of to-day were to-morrow the kings.
Chaos, Chaos, infinite wonder!
Wheeling and reeling on wavering wings;
Whence issued the world, which some think a blunder,
A rumble and tumble and jumble of things!

The minim of being, the dot of creation,
The germ of Sire Adam, of you and of me,
In the folds of the gneiss in Laurentian station,
Far west from the roots of Cape Wrath you may see.
Minims of being, budding and bursting,
All on the floor of the measureless sea!
Small, but for mighty development thirsting,
With throbs of the future, like you, Sir, and me!

The waters, now big with a novel sensation,
Brought corals and buckies and bivalves to view,
Who dwell in shell houses, a soft-bodied nation;
But fishes with fins were yet none in the blue.
Buckies and bivalves, a numberless nation!
Buckies, and bivalves, and trilobites too!
These you will find in Silurian station,
When Ramsay and Murchison sharpen your view.

Then fins were invented; when Queen Amphitrite
Stirred up her force from Devonian beds,
The race of the fishes in ocean grew mighty,
Queer-looking fishes with bucklers for heads.

Fishes, fishes—small greedy fishes!
With wings on their shoulders and horns on their heads,
With scales bright and shiny, that shoot through the briny
Cerulean halls on Devonian beds!

God bless the fishes!—but now on the dry land,
In days when the sun shone benign on the poles,
Forests of ferns in the low and the high land
Spread their huge fans, soon to change into coals!
Forests of ferns—a wonderful verity!
Rising like palm-trees beneath the North Pole;
And all to prepare for the golden prosperity
Of John Bull reposing on iron and coal.

Now Nature the eye of the gazer entrances
With wonder on wonder from teeming abodes;
From the gills of the fish to true lungs she advances,
And bursts into blossoms of tadpoles and toads.
Strange Batrachian people, Triassic all,
Like hippopotamus huge on the roads!
You may call them ungainly, uncouth, and unclassical,
But great in the reign of the Trias were Toads!

Behold, a strange monster our wonder engages,
If dolphin or lizard your wit may defy,
Some thirty feet long on the shore of Lyme-Regis,
With a saw for a jaw, and a big staring eye.
A fish or a lizard? an ichthyosaurus,
With a big goggle eye, and a very small brain,
And paddles like mill-wheels in clattering chorus,
Smiting tremendous the dread-sounding main!

And here comes another! can shape more absurd be,
The strangest and oddest of vertebrate things?
Who knows if this creature a beast or a bird be,
A fowl without feathers, a serpent with wings?
A beast or a bird—an equivocal monster!
A crow or a crocodile, who can declare?
A greedy, voracious, long-necked monster,
Skimming the billow, and ploughing the air.

Next rises to view the great four-footed nation,
Hyenas and tapirs, a singular race,
You may pick up their wreck from the great Paris basin,
At the word of command every bone finds its place.
Palæothere, very singular creature!
A horse or a tapir, or both can you say?

Showing his grave pachydermatous feature,
Just where the Frenchman now sips his café.

And now the life-temple grows vaster and vaster,
Only the pediment fails to the plan;
The winged and the wingless are waiting their master,
The Mammoth is howling a welcome to Man.
Mammoth, Mammoth! mighty old Mammoth!
Strike with your hatchet and cut a good slice;
The bones you will find, and the hide of the mammoth,
Packed in stiff cakes of Siberian ice.

At last the great biped, the crown of the mammals,
Sire Adam, majestic, comes treading the sod,
A measureless animal, free without trammels
To swing all the space from an ape to a god.
Wonderful biped, erect and featherless!
Sport of two destinies, treading the sod,
With the perilous license, unbridled and tetherless,
To sink to a devil or rise to a god.

And thus was completed—miraculous wonder!
The world, this mighty mysterious thing;

I believe it is more than a beautiful blunder,
And worship, and pray, and adore, while I sing.
Wonder and miracle!—God made the wonder;
Come, happy creatures, and worship with me!
I know it is more than a beautiful blunder,
And I hope Tait, and Tyndall, and Huxley agree.