"And God said. Let the waters swarm swarms, the soul of life, and
let fowl fly above the earth in the face of the firmament of
heaven.
"And God created the monsters, the great ones, and every soul of
life that creepeth, with which the waters swarmed, after their
kind, and every winged fowl after his kind; and God saw that it
was good.
"And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill
the waters in the sea, and let fowl multiply on the earth.
"And there was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day."
The fifth and sixth days of Creation are those to which the theory
of development chiefly refers. It will, therefore, be better to
defer the consideration of its bearing on the narrative till the
relation of that narrative to Geological facts has been
considered, since it can only be thoroughly weighed when taken in
connexion with the facts which belong to the two days.
The beginning of the fifth day may be assigned to a point near
where the Trias is succeeded by the Lias. As the Trias is drawing
to its close, the class of reptiles, whose first known appearance
belongs to the carboniferous epoch of the third day, begins to
show signs of advance. The first true Saurians are found in the
Trias: the great development takes place in the Lias and Oolite,
while in the chalk large quantities of kindred remains are found,
which, however, are not identical with the species found in the
earlier groups. Of these some were probably almost entirely
aquatic, as their limbs take the form of paddles; others were
purely terrestrial, a large proportion were amphibious, and some,
as the pterodactylus, bore the same relation to the rest of their
class as the bats bear to the other mammalia, being furnished with
membranous wings, supported upon a special development of the
anterior limbs. One important characteristic of the race at this
time was the great size of many of its members: thirty feet is by
no means an uncommon length. This marks the fitness of the name
given to the class by Moses.
Very few actual remains of birds have been found; but this is not
surprising, since birds would rarely be exposed to the conditions
which were essential to the fossilization of their remains. The
earliest known fossil bird is the Archaeopteryx, the remains of
which were found in 1862 in the Solenhofen Slates, which belong to
the Oolite formation. Though the actual remains of birds are very
few, traces of their footprints have been found in many places,
from the New Red Sandstone upwards, and these traces prove not
only that they were very numerous, but also that they attained to
a gigantic size, as their feet were sometimes from twelve to
fifteen inches in length, and their stride extended from six to
eight feet. During this period, then, these two classes must have
been the dominant races of the earth. As the precursors of these
classes made their appearance at a much earlier period, so the
epoch of birds and reptiles witnessed the beginning and gradual
advance of the class which was to succeed them in the foremost
place--the mammalia. Generally, however, the mammalian remains of
this period belong to what are considered the lower classes--the
monotremata and marsupialia. The close of this period must have
been a time of great disturbance in the Northern Hemisphere, since
the chalk which runs through a great part of Northern Europe, and
frequently attains a thickness of 1000 feet, must have been
deposited at the bottom of a deep sea, and subsequently elevated.