Paleontology, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It bears nearly the same sort of relation to the physical history of the past that biography does to the civil and political history of the past.

The Testimony of the Rocks; of, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two, Theologies, Natural and Revealed, Lecture First (p. 33), Gould & Lincoln. 1857