What mystery is there here—and how shall I proceed to enunciate the conception which I have ventured to form of what may prove to be its proper solut… - Robert Chambers

Indifference to life and indifference to the purity and amenity that sweeten existence must necessarily go together.

The whole history of lamentation, and mourning, and woe, from the beginning of the world—the funeral ceremonies in which the living symbolize the intensity of their grief—the monuments they rear to tell the world for centuries to come of the calamity they have suffered from the stroke of death—are enduring attestations that it is not so much in the removal of one sentient and living being off the earth, as in the change—the calamitous change to the survivors—that death is truly the King of Terrors.

One important remark has been made, that a comparatively small variety of species is found in the older rocks, although of some particular ones the remains are very abundant...