blessing, freedom from sin and Satan, as well as from the cruel bonds that had made her the slave of man, her cup of joy was full, she wished no more, and she determined to remain in the place where God had met and blessed her.

The

Under the preaching of the good Missionary, and the teaching of the Holy Spirit, she grew in the faith and love of Jesus, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of her God for twelve years; and then, alas! unmindful of the divine injunctions, "Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation," her heart began to decline from his testimonies. The first temptation to which she yielded was a dance. On that night, she could not look up with her wonted confidence to her heavenly Father; the form of prayer, indeed, remained, but the Spirit had departed, not soon to return. first step in the slippery path of sin was but preparatory to another, and another still more fatal, till she made shipwreck of faith and a good conscience. For four years she followed with the multitude to do evil, but the eye of the compassionate Redeemer followed the poor wanderer, and, in the multitude of his tender mercies, brought her back to his fold; and though he did not utterly remove his loving-kindness, he visited her transgressions with a rod, and her iniquities with stripes. Jejana was now a wife, and the mother of two little ones. The eldest was removed suddenly, the other appeared on the borders of the grave, and herself laid on the bed of sickness. Now, in her affliction, she remembered Him, who had been her hope and help in happier days, and in an agony of soul she cried, "O God, spare my child, for it is innocent, and strike its guilty mother."

The child was spared, and her own health restored, but no ray of light broke in upon her benighted soul; she became a prey to the most fearful temptation, the great enemy of souls persuaded her she had committed the unpardonable sin, and for four months she lingered on the borders of despair, not so much as daring to lift up her eyes to heaven. As she sat one day bemoaning her lost condition, the Holy Spirit brought to her mind the words of the prophet, "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely; for mine anger is turned away from them;" and she again found peace at the cross of that Saviour whom she had forsaken. On this memorable day, as Jejana was standing at her door, with the tears of mingled joy and grief upon her cheek, a man came up, and, with a dejected countenance, begged a cup of water. On complying she observed that it was troubled, and unfit to drink, "Not so troubled as my soul," he replied. "Is your soul distressed," said she, go to the Saviour; I found him this morning, and he is as ready to pardon, and save, and bless you." It was a word in season to his sorrowful spirit; he sought, and obtained at the cross of the Son of God, the relief he needed. Warned and instructed by her fall, Jejana became more humble, watchful, and prayerful, and till this time, a period of more than forty years, has walked humbly with her God. Having lived with her husband in service, her life had passed in even tenor, without experiencing that anxious care in rearing an infant family, which the labouring class so often experience. It is the lot of all, however, to feel that man is born to trouble, and many a cloud of sorrow now arose to dim the path of this poor pilgrim; but strong in faith, and earnest in prayer, she was sustained by the arm of Omnipotence, and could rejoice even in tribulation.

David, her husband, was obliged to leave his home to join the army General Janssen had raised in defence of the Cape, and Jejana following his footsteps, was exposed to many trying vicissitudes. At length the troops being disbanded, she and her husband returned to their former occupation; her health, however, soon declined, and she had notice to seek another home, an event

which filled them with sorrow, though God meant it for good. One bright morning, having committed themselves and their little ones to the care and guidance of heaven, they went forth to seek employment, and a place where they might lay their heads. By the kind. ness of Providence they found upon the Downs an empty cottage, and having obtained permission to dwell there, they were soon settled in their new abode; and though now more than fourteen miles from the house of God, Jejana's seat was seldom vacant, for she loved his dwelling-place.

David, her husband, maintained his family by working for the farmers around, and cutting reeds; but as his employment was somewhat uncertain, they were occasionally brought very low, and yet He who taketh care of sparrows, and feedeth the meanest insect he has made, appeared for them in every time of need, and Jejana can bring her attestation to the faithfulness of Him who has declared, that those who scek first the kingdom of God, shall want no good thing. Once, when she knew not how to supply the next meal for her children, she went to a farmer in the neighbourhood; his mother arrived, and seeing Jejana going away, she begged the servant to call her, asked her if she feared God, and said, "God has sent you this (giving her a sealed packet) to buy bread for you and your little ones; I dreamt of you and your distress last night, and God has sent me to relieve you."

Another instance of God's watchful care over his children succeeded this.-David and Jejana had lived three years in this mud hovel, and they loved their humble dwelling, for they had many proofs that God was there to bless and keep them, but now it was given away, and whither should they go? Jejana sighed deeply as she saw the surveyor (Mr Melville) appear, accompanied by the person to whom the land had been given, and as she stood with tearful eyes to watch their progress, the farmer noticed her sorrow, and begged her to be comforted, for he would never turn her out. With an expression of pious resignation she thanked him, but said "my trust is not in an arm of flesh, but in God." The words, and the manner in which they were uttered, arrested the attention of the benevolent surveyor, for he was a man of God, and loved his fellow-creatures, one of the noble few who would barter all selfish interest for the delight of doing good, and deem the exchange the greatest luxury of life. He went to Jejana's cottage, heard her story, and left her with a promise soon to return; he did so, and gladdened this poor family, by informing them of his success in their behalf; the Erf upon which they now lived, was measured and secured to them.

Prosperity now smiled upon them; Jejana's children were of an age to be useful, and as they had been trained in virtuous and industrious habits, were of great value to their parents; a hut was soon erected, and a garden planted; the sterility of the soil for many a long year disappointed their hopes, though it at length yielded, to patient and persevering labour, abundant returns; an ox was added to their store, and then another, till they called a span their own; and then the reeds, and the produce of their garden could be taken to the best market, and their little wealth increased, till their present substantial and comfortable dwelling was erected, and God has blessed their wealth; her house has long been the house of prayer to all around, and there the Missionary loves to meet the little flock, for it has often proved to him the gate of heaven.

Jejana cannot read, but her knowledge of the Word of God might shame many a lettered Christian,-it is written on her heart, and is as a fountain of living waters perpetually rising up, to refresh her own soul, and the souls of those who approach her; but though destitute of the key of knowledge herself, she has not only taken care that her family (all daughters) should

possess that invaluable blessing, but has taught them | to use it aright. After the hard labour of the day, those excellent young women devote the evening to the instruction of their poor neighbours; nor do they ever separate, till their pious mother has directed them to the widow's God, and drawn them around the mercyseat to implore for them the blessing of salvation. Jejana's heart is full of those kind and gentle charities that Christianity inspires; her love to God her Saviour, and zeal for his glory, will never suffer her to let open impiety pass without severe rebuke; and the following instance is recorded to show that such a practice may prove as beneficial to the sinner, as it is consistent in the Christian:

Once, while Jejana was keeping the oxen in the Downs, during a dreadful thunderstorm, two English gentlemen rode up, and with oaths and curses demanded to be shewn the road, which they had lost. Jejana, sharply rebuking them, advised them to take shelter till the storm was over; but in language still more awful they defied the storm, and Him that rode thereon. She bade them go, but said, the God whom they blasphemed would stop them in their mad career. They left her with horrid imprecations, but one of them was struck down by the lightning, and carried into a house as dead; he, however, recovered, and years after sought her out to thank her for her reproof, which he declared had reached his heart, and had been the means of bringing him to the Saviour's feet.

Jejana still lives a monument of what divine grace can effect for a Hottentot; a mother in Israel, warning and exhorting the ungodly, comforting and encouraging the penitent, visiting the beds of the sick and dying. Time has shed its snows on her honoured head, and her frail tenement must soon descend to the house appointed for all living, but with faith and patience she awaits the summons that is to bid her rise to the bright regions of purity and peace, there to join in the song of the blessed: "Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion, for ever and ever. Amen." Reader! the first sermon the subject of the preceding narrative ever heard reached her heart, and produced results that will extend to all eternity. How solemn is the thought, that the light of thousands around us has gone out in utter darkness, who might have believed and been saved, had Christians in this country been worthy of the holy name by which they are called! Surely this affecting thought ought to arouse all our energies to assist in circulating the joyful sound amidst Africa's degraded, unhappy children.

Christianity never intended that its sons and daughters should sit down in their selfishness, and draw around them this world's comforts and refinements, content with now and then giving a little of their substance to the poor. No; it demands the same mind that was in Christ, and a consecration of time, talents, energies, and substance to God, who has made it our highest happiness, as well as duty, to become fellow-workers with him.

The ambition, then, of hoarding up treasure, and adding field to field, cannot be the ambition of a Christian. No; his takes a nobler flight, and seeks for glory, and honour, and immortality, not for himself alone, but for the commonwealth of Israel.

RECORDS OF CREATION. No. V.

ORGANIC REMAINS.

BY THE REV. JOHN ANDERSON,

Minister of Newburgh.

THE mineral strata of the earth are not only, as we have stated in a former paper, arranged according to a

fixed order of superposition, but they are also resolvable into several distinct groups, according to characters peculiar to each. One essential character, by which rocks may be distinguished, necessarily arises out of the mineral materials which enter into their composition; some, again, possess a more compact and crystalline texture than others; and not a few can be recognised by their colour, laminated structure, and other external appearances. The more ancient rocks, geologically termed primitive, are the hardest and most crystalline of any; and generally, as we descend to the more recent formations, we find more of a mechanical structure prevailing amongst them, and less induration in their component particles. But there are other tests more definite and precise than any of these, and without which geology would have been divested of much of the charm and interest which attach to it as a science Placed in circumstances of juxta-position, one rock might easily have been distinguished from another; but when seas and continents intervened, or even when separated, as they often are, by considerable intervals in the same country, it would have been difficult to pronounce upon the identity of any series of rocks. Besides, there would have been very little interesting in such knowledge, even if attained with any degree of accuracy, as nothing farther could have been intimated than the fact, that differences did exist among the rocky strata of the earth; but how these were produced what was the state and condition of the earth at the period of their formation-could not have been ascertained, nor even so much as conjectured. Now, in the organic remains which lie entombed in the interior of the earth, we have a more accurate test to enable us to decide upon these points, by which the contemporary origin of different groups can often be established, even where all identity of mineralogical character is wanting, and where no light can be derived from the order of superposition.

We are here led to the consideration of one of the most singular and interesting pages in the whole volume of nature. Job speaks of "the stones of darkness and the shadow of death;" and here certainly we have displayed before us the repositories of the dead, not in their usually appalling spectacle of corruption and decay, but in well arranged specimens of the various orders of creation-types of every form of vegetable and animal life, at once fresh and beautiful to contemplate.

When a plant or an animal dies, the inanimate substance usually lies upon the surface of the ground until the several parts are disunited, or decomposed into their simple elements. The plant withers, the animal corrupts, and is disorganized; and speedily both are reduced to dust, and form henceforth part of the soil which nourished and sustained them. Such is the usual fate, sooner or later, of all that lives and breathes upon the earth. But when we penetrate into the rocky crust, we find that this has not always been the case. Forming part of the real solid stone, both plants and animals are found, with all their organization and structure as perfect and entire, as the moment at which they ceased to live. The root, the stem, the leaves, nay, sometimes the flower and fruit of the most tender plant, which could not stand erect in the breeze, are there, spread out on the surface of the rock with all the care and delicacy of the most skilful herbalist, and sustaining the weight and pressure of many thousands of feet of solid rock. Animal forms are equally well preserved, some of them being so minute as to require the aid of the microscope to detect them, and others of the gigantic dimensions of seventy or eighty feet in length. Sometimes single bones are found, particularly the teeth and such portions as are least liable to decomposition; but frequently the entire skeleton is obtained, with no alteration in its parts except what has been occasioned by their compression into a flatten.

Another circumstance, which cannot fail to excite attention in considering the history of organic remains, is the matter or substance of which they consist. They are termed petrifactions, which is compounded of two words signifying to be made stones, because they are actually converted into a mineral substance, the quality of which is determined by that of the rock in which they are contained. In some instances, the animal or vegetable matter has been entirely dissolved or removed, and the mineral matter of the rock so nicely substituted, as to assume the perfect form of the internal structure, even to the minutest vessel or fibre, of the plant or animal. Sometimes the process of petrifaction has been carried no farther than the infiltration of the stony matter into the pores of the organized body. In other cases, again, the animal or vegetable substance has been wholly preserved, and the plant or animal has undergone no other change than the removal of such parts as are the most liable to dissolution and decay. The process of petrifaction is usually the most perfect an ong the older strata, while among the more recent, and generally throughout all the tertiary group, the contained relics have sustained little alteration. This principle, however, is so far from holding universally, that among the old red sandstone and other secondary strata, remains are found where no substitution has taken place; where, for example, fish scales occur in the greatest abundance, possessing still their pearly lustre, and the other qualities by which they are characterised. Thus wonderful are the processes of nature, minute and diversified beyond the ingenuity of man to trace them, either in the living or dead substance! And lo! these are but parts of His ways by whom "dead things are formed from under the waters, and all the inhabitants thereof."

Another remarkable peculiarity connected with these vegetable and animal remains, so perfectly and curiously preserved, is the manner and order of their distribution. They are not found indiscriminately huddled together in all rocks, whatever be their position and relation to one another. On the contrary, particular classes are confined to particular groups of the rocky strata; and so completely is this the case, that, in no two of the great divisions according to which the mineral masses of the earth are arranged, do we find the same species occurring, of either plants or animals. Every group possesses its own peculiar organic remains nearly as distinct and entire, as any two countries, situated in the remotest extremes of latitude or climate from each other, are at present distinguished by their vegetable and animal productions.

1. The primitive rocks, consisting of gneiss, schist, mica slate, &c., are destitute of fossil remains, because, as the term is meant to intimate, they are supposed to have been deposited before the existence of either vegetable or animal life; there are no portions of other rocks imbedded in them, nor any traces of a derivative

2. The group which succeeds begins, for the first time, to exhibit organic remains, sparingly in the lower members, which consist of clay-slate, and grey sandstone, but gradually increasing through the ascending series, till in the mountain limestone they are found in the greatest abundance, which consist chiefly of shells and corals. The old red sandstone contains one remarkable species of fossil; the scales, and lately an entire impression, has been found of an amphibious reptile, which has not been described by any of the learned; also the outline, covered with scales, of some unknown fishes; these occur principally in the beds which occupy the lower basin of the Tay and the valley of Stratheden. Impressions of aquatic plants are likewise found in some of the members of this group. In the mountain limestone the testaceous and zoophyte orders occur in the greatest abundance; also orthoceratites, which belong to the cephalopodon tribe, deemed the lowest in the animal scale, from the simplicity of their structure, are found in great profusion along with fragments of entrochi and encrinites.

3. Above all these lies the coal formation, consisting of alternate strata of coal, sandstone, shale, and ironstone, repeated in many instances a hundred times, and every one of which is replete with organic remains. The vegetable relics are allied to the fern and palm tribes, which occur in the greatest profusion in the shale deposit, in the finest state of preservation, and of gigantic dimensions. The sandstone contains the roots, trunks, and branches of trees; a specimen was obtained some years ago at Gosforth, near Newcastleupon-Tyne, which measured seventy-two feet in length, four feet in diameter at its lower extremity, and tapering gradually to about eighteen inches at the top; another instance lately occurred in the sandstone quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh, where a trunk was obtained forty-seven feet long, and five feet at its greatest diameter; this tree lay in an inclined position, with upwards of a hundred feet of solid rock above it, and exhibiting all its original roundness and most perfect woody structure. In some of the sandstone quarries throughout Fife, specimens of fossil trees, and in a perfect state of preservation, are frequently met with. The coal itself is composed entirely of the remains of vegetables, but, in consequence of the great change which they have designedly undergone for the most beneficent purposes, few traces of the vegetable structure can be detected, while yet the combustible qualities are all preserved.

4. Nature would here seem to have exhausted, for a time, her productive powers, for in the series of beds which succeeds the era of the coal formation, and which are estimated at the immense thickness of two thousand one hundred feet, few organic remains of any kind occur. The salt mines, not only of Cheshire, but of Poland, Spain, and Italy, are all situated in this group, and the scarcity of animals and vegetables is generally attributed, among the learned, to the prevalence during this period of magnesia and salt in excess. In the Sacred Scriptures, salt is repeatedly mentioned as an emblem of barrenness. The oolite group-which follows next in the order of superposition, and which derives its name from two Greek words signifying egg and stone, because it contains a limestone composed of small round grains like the eggs in the roe of a fish-is again remarkable, not only for an excessive abundance of both vegetable and animal relics, but for the gigantic size and singular characters of the animals which prevailed during that period. These consist of a tribe of