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Other documents randomly have
different content
slug or the snail, and enables it to crawl like them, but still more
slowly, by a succession of adhesions. The locomotive powers of the
trilobite seem to have been little superior to those of the chiton. If
furnished with legs at all, it must have been with soft rudimentary
membranaceous legs, little fitted for walking with; and it seems quite
as probable, from the peculiarly shaped under margin of its shell,
formed, like that of the chiton, for adhering to flat surfaces, that, like
the slug and the snail, it was unfurnished with legs of any kind, and
crept on the abdomen. The vast conglomerations of trilobites for
which the Silurian rocks are remarkable, are regarded as further
evidence of a sedentary condition, Like Ostreæ, Chitones, and other
sedentary animals, they seemed to have adhered together in vast
clusters, trilobite over trilobite, in the hollows of submarine
precipices, or on the flat, muddy bottom below. And such were the
master existences of three of the four Silurian platforms, and of the
greater part of the fourth, if, indeed, we may not regard the
chambered molluscs, their contemporaries,—creatures with their
arms clustered round their heads, and with a nervous system
composed of a mere knotted cord,—as equally high in the scale. We
rise to the topmost layers of the system,—to an upper gallery of its
highest platform,—and find nature mightily in advance.
Another and superior order of existences had sprung into being
at the fiat of the Creator—creatures with the brain lodged in the
head, and the spinal cord enclosed in a vertebrated column. In the
period of the Upper Silurian, fish properly so called, and of very
perfect organization, had become denizens of the watery element,
and had taken precedence of the crustacean, as, at a period long
previous, the crustacean had taken precedence of the annelid. In
what form do these, the most ancient beings of their class, appear?
As cartilaginous fishes of the higher order. Some of them were
furnished with bony palates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well
adapted for crushing the stone-cased zoöphytes and shells of the
period, fragments of which occur in their fœcal remains; some with
teeth that, like those of the fossil sharks of the later formations,
resemble lines of miniature pyramids, larger and smaller alternating;
some with teeth sharp, thin, and so deeply serrated that every
individual tooth resembles a row of poniards set upright against the
walls of an armory; and these last, says Agassiz, furnished with
weapons so murderous, must have been the pirates of the period.
Some had their fins guarded with long spines, hooked like the beak
of an eagle; some with spines of straighter and more slender form,
and ribbed and furrowed longitudinally like columns; some were
shielded by an armor of bony points; and some thickly covered with
glistening scales. If many ages must have passed ere fishes
appeared, there was assuredly no time required to elevate their
lower into their higher families. Judging, too, from this ancient
deposit, they seem to have been introduced, not by individuals and
pairs, but by whole myriads.
"Forthwith, the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,
With fry innumerable swarmed; and shoals
Of fish, that with their fins and shining scales
Glide under the green wave in plumps and sculls,
Banked the mid sea."
The fish-bed of the Upper Ludlow Rock abounds more in osseous
remains than an ancient burying-ground. The stratum, over wide
areas, seems an almost continuous layer of matted bones, jaws,
teeth, spines, scales, palatal plates, and shagreen-like prickles, all
massed together, and converted into a substance of so deep and
shining a jet color, that the bed, when "first discovered, conveyed
the impression," says Mr. Murchison, "that it enclosed a triturated
heap of black beetles." And such are the remains of what seem to
have been the first existing vertebrata. Thus, ere our history begins,
the existences of two great systems, the Cambrian and the Silurian,
had passed into extinction, with the exception of what seem a few
connecting links, exclusively molluscs, that are found in England to
pass from the higher beds of the Ludlow rocks into the Lower or
Tilestone beds of the Old Red Sandstone.[AZ] The exuviæ of at least
four platforms of being lay entombed furlong below furlong, amid
the gray, mouldering mudstones, the harder arenaceous beds, the
consolidated clays, and the concretionary limestones, that underlay
the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red. The earth had already
become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea
equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface.
[AZ] "Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described
as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and Silurian period, and of these only
about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series; while but
fifteen are common to the whole Palæozoic period, and not one extends beyond
it."—(M. de Verneuil and Count D'Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.)

The first scene in the Tempest opens amid the confusion and
turmoil of the hurricane—amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of
the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the
wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by
the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half
of Scotland, to have opened in a similar manner. The finely-
laminated lower Tilestones of England were deposited evidently in a
calm sea. During the contemporary period in our own country, the
vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall, and
Gamrie, and many a thousand square mile besides, was the scene of
a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by
waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from
a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different
localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of
commotion. The hardest masses which the stratum encloses,—
porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and
masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel,—are
yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms, not an angular
fragment appearing in some parts of the mass for yards together.
The debris of our harder rocks rolled for centuries in the beds of our
more impetuous rivers, or tossed for ages along our more exposed
and precipitous sea-shores, could not present less equivocally the
marks of violent and prolonged attrition than the pebbles of this bed.
And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea
should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly
extended a space as that which intervenes between Mealforvony in
Inverness-shire and Pomona in Orkney in one direction, and
between Applecross and Trouphead in another—and for a period so
prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with
a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock,
fifteen stories' height in thickness. The very variety of its contents
shows that the period must have been prolonged. A sudden flood
sweeps away with it the accumulated debris of a range of
mountains; but to blend together, in equal mixture, the debris of
many such ranges, as well as to grind down their roughnesses and
angularities, and fill up the interstices with the sand and gravel
produced in the process, must be a work of time. I have examined
with much interest, in various localities, the fragments of ancient
rock inclosed in this formation. Many of them are no longer to be
found in situ, and the group is essentially different from that
presented by the more modern gravels. On the shores of the Frith of
Cromarty, for instance, by far the most abundant pebbles are of a
blue schistose gneiss: fragments of gray granite and white quartz
are also common; and the sea-shore at half ebb presents at a short
distance the appearance of a long belt of bluish gray, from the color
of the prevailing stones which compose it. The prevailing color of the
conglomerate of the district, on the contrary, is a deep red. It
contains pebbles of small-grained, red granite, red quartz rock, red
feldspar, red porphyry, an impure red jasper, red hornstone, and a
red granitic gneiss, identical with the well-marked gneiss of the
neighboring Sutors. This last is the only rock now found in the
district, of which fragments occur in the conglomerate. It must have
been exposed at the time to the action of the waves, though
afterwards buried deep under succeeding formations, until again
thrust to the surface by some great internal convulsion, of a date
comparatively recent.[BA]
[BA] The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one of the later
geological revolutions has half filled some of our northern valleys, and covered the
slopes of the adjacent hills, present, in a few localities, appearances somewhat
analogous to those exhibited by this ancient formation. There are uncemented
accumulations of water-rolled pebbles, in the neighborhood of Inverness, from
ninety to a hundred feet in thickness. But this stratum, unlike the more ancient
one, wanted continuity. It must have been accumulated, too, under the operation
of more partial, though immensely more powerful agencies. There is a mediocrity
of size in the enclosed fragments of the old conglomerate, which gives evidence of
a mediocrity of power in the transporting agent. In the upper gravels, on the
contrary, one of the agents could convey from vast distances blocks of stone
eighty and a hundred tons in weight. A new cause of tremendous energy had
come into operation in the geological world.

The period of this shallow and stormy ocean passed. The bottom,
composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the
summit of some of our loftiest mountains, sank throughout its wide
area to a depth so profound as to be little affected by tides or
tempests. During this second period there took place a vast deposit
of coarse sandstone strata, with here and there a few thin beds of
rolled pebbles. The general subsidence of the bottom still continued,
and, after a deposit of full ninety feet had overlain the conglomerate,
the depth became still more profound than at first. A fine, semi-
calcareous, semi-aluminous deposition took place in waters perfectly
undisturbed. And here we first find proof that this ancient ocean
literally swarmed with life—that its bottom was covered with
miniature forests of algæ, and its waters darkened by immense
shoals of fish.
In middle autumn, at the close of the herring season, when the
fish have just spawned, and the congregated masses are breaking
up on shallow and skerry, and dispersing by myriads over the deeper
seas, they rise at times to the surface by a movement so
simultaneous, that for miles and miles around the skiff of the
fisherman nothing may be seen but the bright glitter of scales, as if
the entire face of the deep were a blue robe spangled with silver. I
have watched them at sunrise at such seasons on the middle of the
Moray Frith, when, far as the eye could reach, the surface has been
ruffled by the splash of fins, as if a light breeze swept over it, and
the red light has flashed in gleams of an instant on the millions and
tens of millions that were leaping around me, a handbreadth into the
air, thick as hail-stones in a thunder-shower. The amazing amount of
life which the scene included, has imparted to it an indescribable
interest. On most occasions the inhabitants of ocean are seen but by
scores and hundreds; for in looking down into their green twilight
haunts, we find the view bounded by a few yards, or at most a few
fathoms; and we can but calculate on the unseen myriads of the
surrounding expanse by the seen few that occupy the narrow space
visible. Here, however, it was not the few, but the myriads, that
were seen—the innumerable and inconceivable whole—all palpable
to the sight as a flock on a hill-side; or, at least, if all was not
palpable, it was only because sense has its limits in the lighter as
well as in the denser medium—that the multitudinous distracts it,
and the distant eludes it, and the far horizon bounds it. If the scene
spoke not of infinity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it
spoke of it in at least the only sense in which man can comprehend
it.
Now, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amazing
multiplicity of being—when we think of it at all—with reference to
but the later times of the world's history. We think of the remote
past as a time of comparative solitude. We forget that the now
uninhabited desert was once a populous city. Is the reader prepared
to realize, in connection with the Lower Old Red Sandstone—the
second period of vertebrated existence—scenes as amazingly fertile
in life as the scene just described—oceans as thoroughly occupied
with being as our friths and estuaries when the herrings congregate
most abundantly on our coasts? There are evidences too sure to be
disputed that such must have been the case. I have seen the
ichthyolite beds, where washed bare in the line of the strata, as
thickly covered with oblong, spindle-shaped nodules as I have ever
seen a fishing bank covered with herrings; and have ascertained that
every individual nodule had its nucleus of animal matter—that it was
a stone coffin in miniature, holding enclosed its organic mass of
bitumen or bone—its winged, or enamelled, or thorn-covered
ichthyolite.
At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in
sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from
boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in
Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit
unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted,
contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent round to the
head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish
that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys shows its arms extended at
their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all
the ichthyolites on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger, and
pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the
after attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have
survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and
total, so far as it extended. There are proofs that, whatever may
have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken place in
a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by some slight
undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a few inches, and
still exhibit their enamel entire, and their peculiar fineness of edge.
The spines, even when separated, retain their original needle-like
sharpness of point. Rays, well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are
enclosed unbroken in the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which
not only all the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff
and threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was over.
Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must have been of a
kind by which the calm was nothing disturbed. In what could it have
originated? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the
innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square
miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which
they had lived left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks
footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty
over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases of mysterious
origin break out at times in the animal kingdom, and well nigh
exterminate the tribes on which they fall. The present generation
has seen a hundred millions of the human family swept away by a
disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the fatal murrain
that once depopulated the Alps, not more as a poet than as a
historian. The shell-fish of the rivers of North America died in such
vast abundance during a year of the present century, that the
animals, washed out of their shells, lay rotting in masses beside the
banks, infecting the very air. About the close of the last century, the
haddock well nigh disappeared, for several seasons together, from
the eastern coasts of Scotland; and it is related by Creech, that a
Scotch shipmaster of the period sailed for several leagues on the
coast of Norway, about the time the scarcity began, through a
floating shoal of dead haddocks.[BB]
[BB] I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in connection with
what they used to term "the haddock dearth" of this period, that, for several
weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable
taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table.
For the three following years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several
years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related
by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words; it occurs in his third
Letter to Sir John Sinclair: "On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the ship Brothers,
Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast
of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of
dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported
the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest
abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three
years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from
their scarcity, sold for 7s. 6d."
The dead haddocks seen by the Leith shipmaster were floating by thousands;
and most of their congeners among what fishermen term "the white fish," such as
cod, ling, and whiting, also float when dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose
bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The
herring fisherman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them
up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great
weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and herrings. Now, if a
corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period—if some rose
to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom—we must, of
course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation—to
find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may occur
comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may
discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that
disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts
of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a
few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the
Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them
from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus
obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyolites of the Lower Old
Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in
some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know
nothing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found
in some other locality, where they may be regarded as characteristic of a different
formation.

But the ravages of no such disease, however extensive, could

well account for some of the phenomena of this platform of death. It
is rarely that disease falls equally on many different tribes at once,
and never does it fall with instantaneous, suddenness; whereas in
the ruin of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to
have been equally involved; and so suddenly did it perform its work,
that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of terror and surprise.
I have observed, too, that groups of adjoining nodules are charged
frequently with fragments of the same variety of ichthyolite; and the
circumstance seems fraught with evidence regarding both the
original habits of the creatures, and the instantaneous suddenness
of the destruction by which they were overtaken. They seem, like
many of our existing fish, to have been gregarious, and to have
perished together ere their crowds had time to break up and
disperse.
Fish, have been found floating dead in shoals beside submarine
volcanoes—killed either by the heated water, or by mephitic gases.
There are, however, no marks of volcanic activity in connection with
the ichthyolite beds—no marks, at least, which belong to nearly the
same age with the fossils. The disturbing granite of the neighboring
eminences was not upheaved until after the times of the Oolite. But
the volcano, if such was the destroying agent, might have been
distant; nay, from some of the points in an area of such immense
extent, it must have been distant. The beds abound, as has been
said, in lime; and the thought has often struck me that calcined lime,
cast out as ashes from some distant crater, and carried by the winds,
might have been the cause of the widely-spread destruction to which
their organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting
stream, over which a bridge was in the course of building, destroyed
in a single hour, for a full mile below the erection, by the few
troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centring was
removed.
 CHAPTER XIII.
Successors of the exterminated Tribes.—The Gap slowly filled.—Proof that the
Vegetation of a Formation may long survive its Animal Tribes. Probable Cause.
—Immensely extended Period during which Fishes were the Master-existences
of our Planet.—Extreme Folly of an Infidel Objection illustrated by the Fact.—
Singular Analogy between the History of Fishes as Individuals and as a Class.—
Chemistry of the Lower Formation.—Principles on which the Fish-enclosing
Nodules were probably formed.—Chemical Effect of Animal Matter in
discharging the Color from Red Sandstone.—Origin of the prevailing tint to
which the System owes its Name.—Successive Modes in which a Metal may
exist.—The Pest orations of the Geologist void of Color.—Very different
Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and Moray.

The period of death passed, and over the innumerable dead there
settled a soft, muddy sediment, that hid them from the light,
bestowing upon them such burial as a November snow-storm
bestows on the sere and blighted vegetation of the previous summer
and autumn. For an unknown space of time, represented in the
formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the
depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of animal life. A
few scales and plates then begin to appear. The fish that had existed
outside the chasm seem to have gradually gained upon it, as their
numbers increased, just as the European settlers of America have
been gaining on the backwoods, and making themselves homes
amid the burial-mounds of a race extinct for centuries. For a
lengthened period, however, these finny settlers must have been
comparatively few—mere squatters in the waste. In the beds of
stratified clay in which their remains first occur, over what we may
term the densely crowded platform of violent death, the explorer
may labor for hours together without finding a single scale.
It is worthy of remark, however, that this upper bed abounds
quite as much in the peculiar vegetable impressions of the formation
as the lower platform itself. An abundance equally great occurs in
some localities only a few inches over the line of the exterminating
catastrophe. Thickets of exactly the same algæ, amid which the fish
of the formation had sheltered when living, grew luxuriantly over
their graves when dead. The agencies of destruction which
annihilated the animal life of so extended an area, spared its
vegetation; just as the identical forests that had waved over the
semi-civilized aborigines of North America continued to wave over
the more savage red men, their successors, long after the original
race had been exterminated. The inference deducible from the fact,
though sufficiently simple, seems in a geological point of view a not
unimportant one. The flora of a system may long survive its fauna;
so that that may be but one formation, regarded with reference to
plants, which may be two or more formations, regarded with
reference to animals. No instance of any such phenomenon occurs in
the later geological periods. The changes in animal and vegetable
life appear to have run parallel to each other from the times of the
tertiary formations down to those of the coal; but in the earlier
deposits the case must have been different. The animal organisms of
the newer Silurian strata form essentially different groups from those
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and both differ from those of the
Cornstone divisions; and yet the greater portion of their vegetable
remains seem the same. The stem-like impressions of the fucoid bed
of the Upper Ludlow Rocks cannot be distinguished from those of
the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty and Ross, nor these again from the
impressions of the Arbroath pavement, or the Den of Balruddery.
Nor is there much difficulty in conceiving how the vegetation of a
formation should come to survive its animals. What is fraught with
health to the existences of the vegetable kingdom, is in many
instances a deadly poison to those of the animal. The grasses and
water-lilies of the neighborhood of Naples flourish luxuriantly amid
the carbonic acid gas which rests so densely over the pools and
runnels out of which they spring, that the bird stoops to drink, and
falls dead into the water. The lime that destroys the reptiles, fish,
and insects of a thickly inhabited lake or stream, injures not a single
flag or bulrush among the millions that line its edges. The two
kingdoms exist under laws of life and death so essentially dissimilar,
that it has become one of the common-places of poetry to indicate
the blight and decline of the tribes of the one by the unwonted
luxuriancy of the productions of the other. Otway tells us, in
describing the horrors of the plague which almost depopulated
London, that the "destroying angel stretched his arm" over the city,
"Till in th' untrodden streets unwholesome grass
Grew of great stalk, and color gross,
A melancholic poisonous green."
The work of deposition went on; a bed of pale yellow saliferous
sandstone settled, tier over tier, on a bed of stratified clay, and was
itself overlaid by another bed of stratified clay in turn. And this upper
bed had also its organisms. The remains of its sea-weed still spread
out thick and dark amid the foldings of the strata, and occasionally
its clusters of detached scales. But the circumstances were less
favorable to the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those under
which the organisms of the lower platform were wrapped up in their
stony coverings. The matrix, which is more micaceous than the
other, seems to have been less conservative, and the waters were
probably less still. The process went on. Age succeeded age, and
one stratum covered up another. Generations lived, died, and were
entombed in the ever-growing depositions. Succeeding generations
pursued their instincts by myriads, happy in existence, over the
surface which covered the broken and perishing remains of their
predecessors, and then died and were entombed in turn, leaving a
higher platform, and a similar destiny to the generations that
succeeded. Whole races became extinct, through what process of
destruction who can tell? Other races sprang into existence through
that adorable power which One only can conceive, and One only can
exert. An inexhaustible variety of design expatiated freely within the
limits of the ancient type. The main conditions remained the same—
the minor details were dissimilar. Vast periods passed; a class low in
the scale still continued to furnish the master existences of creation;
and so immensely extended was the term of its sovereignty, that a
being of limited faculties, if such could have existed uncreated, and
witnessed the whole, would have inferred that the power of the
Creator had reached its extreme boundary, when fishes had been
called into existence, and that our planet was destined to be the
dwelling-place of no nobler inhabitants. If there be men dignified by
the name of philosophers, who can hold that the present state of
being, with all its moral evil, and all its physical suffering, is to be
succeeded by no better and happier state, just because "all things
have continued as they were" for some five or six thousand years,
how much sounder and more conclusive would the inference have
been which could have been based, as in the supposed case, on a
period perhaps a hundred times more extended?
There exist wonderful analogies in nature between the geological
history of the vertebrated animals as an order, and the individual
history of every mammifer—between the history, too, of fish as a
class, and that of every single fish. "It has been found by
Tiedemann," says Mr. Lyell, "that the brain of the fœtus in the higher
class of vertebrated animals assumes in succession the various forms
which belong to fishes, reptiles, and birds, before it acquires those
additions and modifications which are peculiar to the mammiferous
tribes." "In examining the brain of the mammalia," says M. Serres,
"at an early stage of life, you perceive the cerebral hemispheres
consolidated, as in fish, in two vesicles isolated one from the other;
at a later period you see them affect the configuration of the
cerebral hemispheres of reptiles; still later, again, they present you
with the forms of those of birds; and finally, at the era of birth, the
permanent forms which the adult mammalia present." And such
seems to have been the history of the vertebrata as an order, as
certainly as that of the individual mammifer. The fish preceded the
reptile in the order of creation, just as the crustacean had preceded
the fish, and the annelid the crustacean. Again, though the fact be
somewhat more obscure, the reptile seems to have preceded the
bird. We find, however, unequivocal traces of the feathered tribes in
well-marked foot-prints impressed on a sandstone in North America,
at most not more modern than the Lias, but which is generally
supposed to be of the same age with the New Red Sandstone of
Germany and our own country. In the Oolite—at least one, perhaps
two formations later—the bones of the two species of mammiferous
quadrupeds have been found, apparently of the marsupial family;
and these, says Mr. Lyell, afford the only example yet known of
terrestrial mammalia in rocks of a date anterior to the older tertiary
formations. The reptile seems to have preceded the bird, and the
bird the mammiferous animal. Thus the fœtal history of the nervous
system in the individual mammifer seems typical, in every stage of
its progress, of the history of the grand division at the head of which
the mammifer stands. Agassiz, at the late meeting of the British
Association in Glasgow, mentioned an analogous fact. After
describing the one-sided tail of the more ancient fish, especially the
fish of the Old Red Sandstone,—the subjects of his illustration at the
time,—he stated, as the result of a recent discovery, that the young
of the salmon in their fœtal state exhibit the same unequally-sided
condition of tail which characterizes those existences of the earlier
ages of the world. The individual fish, just as it begins to exist,
presents the identical appearances which were exhibited by the
order when the order began to exist. Is there nothing wonderful in
analogies such as these—analogies that point through the embryos
of the present time to the womb of Nature, big with its
multitudinous forms of being? Are they charged with no such nice
evidence as a Butler would delight to contemplate, regarding that
unique style of Deity, if I may so express myself, which runs through
all his works, whether we consider him as God of Nature, or Author
of Revelation? In this style of type and symbol did He reveal himself
of old to his chosen people; in this style of allegory and parable did
He again address himself to them, when he sojourned among them
on earth.
The chemistry of the formation seems scarce inferior in interest
to its zoology; but the chemist had still much to do for Geology, and
the processes are but imperfectly known. There is no field in which
more laurels await the philosophical chemist than the geological one.
I have said that all the calcareous nodules of the ichthyolite beds
seem to have had originally their nucleus of organic matter. In nine
cases out of ten the organism can be distinctly traced; and in the
tenth there is almost always something to indicate where it lay—an
elliptical patch of black, or an oblong spot, from which the prevailing
color of the stone has been discharged, and a lighter hue
substituted. Is the reader acquainted with Mr. Pepys's accidental
experiment, as related by Mr. Lyell, and recorded in the first volume
of the Geological Transactions? It affords an interesting proof that
animal matter, in a state of putrefaction, proves a powerful agent in
the decomposition of mineral substances held in solution, and of
their consequent precipitation. An earthen pitcher, containing several
quarts of sulphate of iron, had been suffered to remain undisturbed
and unexamined in a corner of Mr. Pepys's laboratory for about a
twelvemonth. Some luckless mice had meanwhile fallen into it, and
been drowned; and when it at length came to be examined, an oily
scum, and a yellow, sulphureous powder, mixed with hairs, were
seen floating on the top, and the bones of the mice discovered lying
at the bottom; and it was found, that over the decaying bodies the
mineral components of the fluid had been separated and
precipitated in a dark-colored sediment, consisting of grains of
pyrites and of sulphur, of copperas in its green and crystalline form,
and of black oxide of iron. The animal and mineral matters had
mutually acted upon one another; and the metallic sulphate,
deprived of its oxygen in the process, had thus cast down its
ingredients. It would seem that over the putrefying bodies of the fish
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone the water had deposited, in like
manner, the lime with which it was charged; and hence the
calcareous nodules in which we find their remains enclosed. The
form of the nodule almost invariably agrees with that of the
ichthyolite within; it is a coffin in the ancient Egyptian style. Was the
ichthyolite twisted half round in the contorted attitude of violent
death? the nodule has also its twist. Did it retain its natural posture?
the nodule presents the corresponding spindle form. Was it broken
up, and the outline destroyed? the nodule is flattened and shapeless.
In almost every instance the form of the organism seems to have
regulated that of the stone. We may trace, in many of these
concretionary masses, the operations of three distinct principles, all
of which must have been in activity at one and the same time. They
are wrapped concentrically each round its organism: they split
readily in the line of the enclosing stratum, and are marked by its
alternating rectilinear bars of lighter and darker color; and they are
radiated from the centre to the circumference. Their concentric
condition shows the chemical influences of the decaying animal
matter; their fissile character and parallel layers of color indicate the
general deposition which was taking place at the time; and their
radiated structure testifies to that law of crystalline attraction,
through which, by a wonderful masonry, the invisible but well-cut
atoms build up their cubes, their rhombs, their hexagons, and their
pyramids, and are at once the architects and the materials of the
structure which they rear.
Another and very different chemical effect of organic matter may
be remarked in the darker colored arenaceous deposits of the
formation, and occasionally in the stratified clays and nodules of the
ichthyolite bed. In a print-work, the whole web is frequently thrown
into the vat and dyed of one color; but there afterwards comes a
discharging process: some chemical mixture is dropped on the
fabric; the dye disappears wherever the mixture touches; and in
leaves, and sprigs, and patches, according to the printer's pattern,
the cloth assumes its original white. Now the colored deposits of the
Old Red Sandstone have, in like manner, been subjected to a
discharging process. The dye has disappeared in oblong or circular
patches of various sizes, from the eighth of an inch to a foot in
diameter; the original white has taken its place; and so thickly are
these speckles grouped in some of the darker-tinted beds, that the
surfaces, where washed by the sea, present the appearance of
sheets of calico. The discharging agent was organic matter; the
uncolored patches are no mere surface films, for, when cut at right
angles, their depth is found to correspond with their breadth, the
circle is a sphere, the ellipsis forms the section of an egg-shaped
body, and in the centre of each we generally find traces of the
organism in whose decay it originated. I have repeatedly found
single scales, in the ichthyolite beds, surrounded by uncolored
spheres about the size of musket bullets. It is well for the young
geologist carefully to mark such appearances—to trace them through
the various instances in which the organism may be recognized and
identified, to those in which its last vestiges have disappeared. They
are the hatchments of the geological world, and indicate that life
once existed where all other record of it has perished.[BC]
[BC] Some of the clay-slates of the primary formations abound in these
circular, uncolored patches, bearing in their centres, like the patches of the Old
Red Sandstone, half obliterated nuclei of black. Were they, too, once fossiliferous?
and do these blank erasures remain to testify to the fact? I find the organic origin
of the patches in the Old Red Sandstone remarked by Professor Fleming as early
as the year 1830, and the remark reiterated by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, in
nearly the same words, but with no acknowledgment, ten years later. The
following is the minute and singularly faithful description of the Professor:—
"On the surface of the strata in the lower beds, circular spots, nearly a foot in
diameter, may be readily perceived by their pale yellow colors, contrasted with the
dark red of the surrounding rock. These spots, however, are not, as may at first be
supposed, mere superficial films, but derive their circular form from a colored
sphere to which they belong. This sphere is not to be distinguished from the rest
of the bed by any difference in mechanical structure, but merely by the absence of
much of that oxide of iron with which the other portion of the mass is charged.
The circumference of this colored sphere is usually well defined; and at its centre
may always be observed matter of a darker color, in some cases disposed in
concentric layers, in others of calcareous and crystalline matter, the remains
probably of some vegetable or animal organism, the decomposition of which
exercised a limited influence on the coloring matter of the surrounding rock. In
some cases I have observed these spheres slightly compressed at opposite sides,
in a direction parallel with the plane of stratification—the result, without doubt, of
the subsidence or contraction of the mass, after the central matter or nucleus had
ceased to exercise its influence."—(Cheek's Edinburgh Journal, Feb. 1831, p. 82.)

It is the part of the chemist to tell us by what peculiar action of

the organic matter the dye was discharged in these spots and
patches. But how was the dye itself procured? From what source
was the immense amount of iron derived, which gives to nearly five
sixths of the Old Red Sandstone the characteristic color to which it
owes its name? An examination of its lowest member, the great
conglomerate, suggests a solution of the query. I have adverted to
the large proportion of red-colored pebbles which this member
contains, and, among the rest, to a red granitic gneiss, which must
have been exposed over wide areas at the time of its deposition, and
which, after the lapse of a period which extended from at least the
times of the Lower Old Red to those of the Upper Oolite, was again
thrust upwards to the surface, to form the rectilinear chain of
precipitous eminences to which the hills of Cromarty and of Nigg
belong. This rock is now almost the sole representative, in the north
of Scotland, of the ancient rocks whence the materials of the Old
Red Sandstone were derived. It abounds in hæmatic iron ore,
diffused as a component of the stone throughout the entire mass,
and which also occurs in it in ponderous insulated blocks of great
richness, and in thin, thread-like veins. When ground down, it forms
a deep red pigment, undistinguishable in tint from the prevailing
color of the sandstone, and which leaves a stain so difficult to be
effaced, that shepherds employ it in some parts of the Highlands for
marking their sheep. Every rawer fragment of the rock bears its
hæmatic tinge; and were the whole ground by some mechanical
process into sand, and again consolidated, the produce of the
experiment would be undoubtedly a deep red sandstone. In an
upper member of the lower formation—that immediately over the
ichthyolite beds—different materials seem to have been employed. A
white, quartzy sand and a pale-colored clay form the chief
ingredients; and though the ochry-tinted coloring matter be also
iron, it is iron existing in a different condition, and in a more diluted
form. The oxide deposited by the chalybeate springs which pass
through the lower members of the formation, would give to white
sand a tinge exactly resembling the tint borne by this upper member.
The passage of metals from lower to higher formations, and from
one combination to another, constitutes surely a highly interesting
subject of inquiry. The transmission of iron in a chemical form,
through chalybeate springs, from deposits in which it had been
diffused in a form merely mechanical, is of itself curious; but how
much more so its passage and subsequent accumulation, as in bog-
iron and the iron of the Coal Measures, through the agency of
vegetation! How strange, if the steel axe of the woodman should
have once formed part of an ancient forest!—if, after first existing as
a solid mass in a primary rock, it should next have come to be
diffused as a red pigment in a transition conglomerate—then as a
brown oxide in a chalybeate spring—then as a yellowish ochre in a
secondary sandstone—then as a component part in the stems and
twigs of a thick forest of arboraceous plants—then again as an iron
carbonate, slowly accumulating at the bottom of a morass of the
Coal Measures—then as a layer of indurated bands and nodules of
brown ore, underlying a seam of coal—and then, finally, that it
should have been dug out, and smelted, and fashioned, and
employed for the purpose of handicraft, and yet occupy, even at this
stage, merely a middle place between the transmigrations which
have passed, and the changes which are yet to come. Crystals of
galena sometimes occur in the nodular limestones of the Old Red
Sandstone; but I am afraid the chemist would find it difficult to fix
their probable genealogy.
In at least one respect, every geological history must of necessity
be unsatisfactory; and, ere I pass to the history of the two upper
formations of the system, the reader must permit me to remind him
of it. There have been individuals, it has been said, who, though
they could see clearly the forms of objects, wanted, through some
strange organic defect, the faculty of perceiving their distinguishing
colors, however well marked these might be. The petals of the rose
have appeared to them of the same sombre hue with its stalk; and
they have regarded the ripe scarlet cherry as undistinguishable in
tint from the green leaves under which it hung. The face of nature to
such men must have for ever rested under a cloud; and a cloud of
similar character hangs over the pictorial restorations of the
geologist. The history of this and the last chapter is a mere profile
drawn in black, an outline without color—in short, such a chronicle
of past ages as might be reconstructed, in the lack of other and
ampler materials, from tombstones and charnel-houses. I have had
to draw the portrait from the skeleton. My specimens show the
general form of the creatures I attempt to describe, and not a few of
their more marked peculiarities; but many of the nicer elegancies are
wanting; and the "complexion to which they have come" leaves no
trace by which to discover the complexion they originally bore. And
yet color is a mighty matter to the ichthyologist. The "fins and
shining scales," "the waved coats, dropt with gold," the rainbow
dyes of beauty of the watery tribes, are connected often with more
than mere external character. It is a curious and interesting fact, that
the hues of splendor in which they are bedecked are, in some
instances, as intimately associated with their instincts—with their
feelings, if I may so speak—as the blush which suffuses the human
countenance is associated with the sense of shame, or its tint of
ashy paleness or of sallow with emotions of rage, or feelings of a
panic terror. Pain and triumph have each their index of color among
the mute inhabitants of our seas and rivers. Poets themselves have
bewailed the utter inadequacy of words to describe the varying tints
and shades of beauty with which the agonies of death dye the scales
of the dolphin, and how every various pang calls up a various
suffusion of splendor.[BD] Even the common stickleback of our ponds
and ditches can put on its colors to picture its emotions. There is, it
seems, a mighty amount of ambition, and a vast deal of fighting
sheerly for conquests' sake, among the myriads of this pygmy little
fish which inhabit our smaller streams; and no sooner does an
individual succeed in expelling his weaker companions from some
eighteen inches or two feet of territory, than straight way the
exultation of conquest converts the faded and freckled olive of his
back and sides into a glow of crimson and bright green. Nature
furnishes him with a regal robe for the occasion. Immediately on his
deposition, however,—and events of this kind are even more
common under than out of the water,—his gay colors disappear, and
he sinks into his original and native ugliness.[BE]
[BD] The description of Falconer must be familiar to every reader, but I cannot
resist quoting it. It shows how minutely the sailor poet must have observed. Byron
tells us how
"Parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
 With a new color, as it gasps away,
The last still loveliest, till—tis gone, and all is gray."
Falconer, in anticipating, reversed the simile. The huge animal, struck by the
"unerring barb" of Rodmond, has been drawn on board, and
"On deck he struggles with convulsive pain;
But while his heart the fatal javelin thrills,
And flitting life escapes in sanguine rills,
What radiant changes strike the astonished sight!
What glowing hues of mingled shade and light!
Not equal beauties gild the lucid West
With parting beams o'er all profusely drest;
Not lovelier colors paint the vernal dawn,
When Orient dews impearl the enamelled lawn;
Than from his sides in bright suffusion flow,
That now with gold empyreal seem to glow;
Now in pellucid sapphires meet the view,
And emulate the soft celestial hue;
Now beam a flaming crimson on the eye,
And now assume the purple's deeper dye.
But here description clouds each shining ray—
What terms of art can Nature's powers display?"
[BE] "In the Magazine of Natural History" says Captain Brown, in one of his
notes to White's Sellorne, "we have a curious account of the pugnacious
propensities of these little animals. 'Having at various times,' says a
correspondent, 'kept these little fish during the spring and part of the summer
months, and paid close attention to their habits. I am enabled from my own
experience to vouch for the facts I am about to relate. I have frequently kept them
in a deal tub, about three feet two inches wide, and about two feet deep. When
they are put in for some time, probably a day or two, they swim about in a shoal,
apparently exploring their new habitation. Suddenly one will take possession of the
tub, or, as it will sometimes happen, the bottom, and will instantly commence an
attack upon his companions; and if any of them venture to oppose his sway, a
regular and most furious battle ensues. They swim round and round each other
with the greatest rapidity, biting, (their mouths being well furnished with teeth,)
and endeavoring to pierce each other with their lateral spines, which, on this
occasion, are projected. I have witnessed a battle of this sort which lasted several
minutes before either would give way; and when one does submit, imagination
can hardly conceive the vindictive fury of the conqueror, who, in the most
persevering and unrelenting way, chases his rival from one part of the tub to
another, until fairly exhausted with fatigue. From this period an interesting change
takes place in the conqueror, who, from being a speckled and greenish-looking
fish, assumes the most beautiful colors; the belly and lower jaws becoming a deep
crimson, and the back sometimes a cream color, but generally a fine green, and
the whole appearance full of animation and spirit. I have occasionally known three
or four parts of the tub taken possession of by these little tyrants, who guard their
territories with the strictest vigilance, and the slightest invasion brings on
invariably a battle. A strange alteration immediately takes place in the defeated
party: his gallant bearing forsakes him, his gay colors fade away, he becomes
again speckled and ugly, and he hides his disgrace among his peaceable
companions.'"

But of color, as I have said, though thus important, the

ichthyologist can learn almost nothing from Geology. The perfect
restoration of even a Cuvier are blank outlines. We just know by a
wonderful accident that the Siberian elephant was red. A very few of
the original tints still remain among the fossils of our north country
Lias. The ammonite, when struck fresh from the surrounding lime,
reflects the prismatic colors, as of old; a huge Modiola still retains its
tinge of tawny and yellow; and the fossilized wood of the formation
preserves a shade of the native tint, though darkened into brown.
But there is considerably less of color in the fossils of the Old Red
Sandstone. I have caught, and barely caught, in some of the newly
disinterred specimens, the faint and evanescent reflection of a tinge
of pearl; and were I acquainted with my own collection only,
imagination, borrowing from the prevailing color, would be apt to
people the ancient oceans, in which its forms existed, with swarthy
races exclusively. But a view of the Altyre fossils would correct the
impression. They are enclosed, like those of Cromarty, in nodules of
an argillaceous limestone. The color, however, from the presence of
iron, and the absence of bitumen, is different. It presents a mixture
of gray, of pink, and of brown; and on this ground the fossil is
spread out in strongly contrasted masses of white and dark red, of
blue, and of purple. Where the exuviæ lie thickest, the white
appears tinged with delicate blue—the bone is but little changed.
Where they are spread out more thinly, the iron has pervaded them,
and the purple and deep red prevail. Thus the same ichthyolite
presents, in some specimens, a body of white and plum-blue
attached to fins of deep red, and with detached scales of red and of
purple lying scattered around it. I need hardly add, however, that all
this variety of coloring is, like the unvaried black of the Cromarty
specimens, the result, merely, of a curious chemistry.
 CHAPTER XIV.
The Cornstone Formation and its Organisms.—Dwarf Vegetation.—Cephalaspides.
—Huge Lobster.—Habitats of the existing Crustacea.—No unapt representation
of the Deposit of Balruddery, furnished by a land-locked Bay in the
neighborhood of Cromarty.—Vast Space occupied by the Geological Formations.
—Contrasted with the half-formed Deposits which represent the existing
Creation.—Inference.—The formation of the Holoptychius.—Probable origin of
its Siliceous Limestone.—Marked increase in the Bulk of the Existences of the
System.—Conjectural Cause.—The Coal Measures.—The Limestone of Burdie
House Conclusion.

The curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower
formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded, on an upper
platform, by the existences of a later creation. There is sea all
around, as before; and we find beneath a dark-colored, muddy
bottom, thickly covered by a dwarf vegetation. The circumstances
diner little from those in which the ichthyolite beds of the preceding
period were deposited; but forms of life, essentially different, career
through the green depths, or creep over the ooze. Shoals of
Cephalaspides, with their broad, arrow-like heads, and their slender,
angular bodies, feathered with fins, sweep past like clouds of
crossbow bolts in an ancient battle. We see the distant gleam of
scales, but the forms are indistinct and dim: we can merely ascertain
that the fins are elevated by spines of various shape and pattern;
that of some the coats glitter with enamel; and that others—the
sharks of this ancient period—bristle over with minute thorny points.
A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions, stalks over the weedy
bottom, or burrows in the hollows of the banks.
Let us attempt bringing our knowledge of the present to bear
upon the past. The larger crustaceæ of the British seas abound most
on iron-bound coasts, where they find sheltering places in the
deeper fissures of sea-cliffs covered up by kelp and tangle, or under
the lower edges of detached boulders, that rest unequally on uneven
platforms of rock, amid forests of the rough-stemmed cuvy. We may
traverse sandy or muddy shores for miles together, without rinding a
single crab, unless a belt of pebbles lines the upper zone of beach,
where the forked and serrated fuci first appear, or a few weed-
covered fragments of rock here and there occur in groups on the
lower zones. In this formation, however, the bottom must have been
formed of mingled sand and mud, and yet the crustacea were
abundant. How account for the fact? There is, in most instances, an
interesting conformity between the character of the ancient rocks, in
which we find groups of peculiar fossils, and the habitats of those
existences of the present creation which these fossils most resemble.
The fisherman casts his nets in a central hollow of the Moray Frith,
about thirty fathoms in depth, and draws them up foul with masses
of a fetid mud, charged with multitudes of that curious purple-
colored zoophyte the sea-pen, invariably an inhabitant of such
recesses. The graptolite of the most ancient fossiliferous rocks, an
existence of unequivocally the same type, occurs in greatest
abundance in a finely-levigated mudstone, for it, too, was a dweller
in the mud. In like manner, we may find the ancient Modiola of the
Lias in habitats analogous to those of its modern representative the
muscle, and the encrinite of the Mountain Limestone fast rooted to
its rocky platform, just as we may see the Helianthoida and
Ascidioida of our seas fixed to their boulders and rocky skerries. But
is not analogy at fault in the present instance? Quite the reverse.
Mark how thickly these carbonaceous impressions cover the muddy-
colored and fissile sandstones of the formation, giving evidence of
an abundant vegetation. We may learn from these obscure
markings, that the place in which they grew could have been no
unfit habitat for the crustaceous tribes.
There is a little, land-locked bay on the southern shore of the
Frith of Cromarty, effectually screened from the easterly winds by
the promontory on which the town is built, and but little affected by
those of any other quarter, from the proximity of the neighboring
shores. The bottom, at low ebb, presents a level plain of sand, so
thickly covered by the green grass-weed of our more sheltered
sandy bays and estuaries, that it presents almost the appearance of
a meadow. The roots penetrate the sand to the depth of nearly a
foot, binding it firmly together; and as they have grown and decayed
in it for centuries, it has acquired, from the disseminated particles of
vegetable matter, a deep leaden tint, more nearly approaching to
black than even the dark gray mudstones of Balruddery. Nor is this
the only effect: the intertwisted fibres impart to it such coherence,
that, where scooped out into pools, the edges stand up
perpendicular from the water, like banks of clay; and where these
are hollowed into cave-like recesses,—and there are few of them
that are not so hollowed,—the recesses remain unbroken and
unfilled for years. The weeds have imparted to the sand a character
different from its own, and have rendered it a suitable habitat for
numerous tribes, which, in other circumstances, would have found
no shelter in it. Now, among these we find in abundance the larger
crustaceans of our coasts. The brown edible crab harbors in the
hollows beside the pools; occasionally we may find in them an
overgrown lobster, studded with parasitical shells and zoöphytes—
proof that the creature, having attained its full size, has ceased to
cast its plated covering. Crustaceans of the smaller varieties abound.
Hermit crabs traverse the pools, or creep among the weed; the dark
green and the dingy, hump-backed crabs occur nearly as frequently;
the radiata cover the banks by thousands. We find occasionally the
remains of dead fish left by the retreating tide; but the living are
much more numerous than the dead; for the sand-eel has suffered
the water to retire, and yet remained behind in its burrow; and the
viviparous blenny and common gunnel still shelter beside their fuci-
covered masses of rock. Imagine the bottom of this little bay
covered up by thick beds of sand and gravel, and the whole
consolidated into stone, and we have in it all the conditions of the
deposit of Balruddery—a mud-colored, arenaceous deposit,
abounding in vegetable impressions, and enclosing numerous
remains of crustaceans, fish, and radiata, as its characteristic
organisms of the animal kingdom. There would be but one
circumstance of difference: the little bay abounds in shells; whereas
no shells have yet been found in the mudstones of Balruddery, or
the gray sandstones of the same formation, which in Forfar, Fife, and
Moray shires represent the Cornstone division of the system.
Ages and centuries passed, but who can sum up their number?
In England, the depth of this middle formation greatly exceeds that
of any of the other two; in Scotland, it is much less amply
developed; but in either country it must represent periods of scarce
conceivable extent. I have listened to the controversies of opposite
schools of geologists, who, from the earth's strata, extract registers
of the earth's age of an amount amazingly different. One class,
regarding the geological field as if under the influence of those
principles of perspective which give to the cottage in front more than
the bulk and altitude of the mountain behind, would assign to the
present scene of things its thousands of years, but to all the extinct
periods united merely their few centuries; while with their
opponents, the remoter periods stretch out far into the bygone
eternity, and the present scene seems but a narrow strip running
along the foreground. Both classes appeal to facts; and, leaving
them to their disputes, I have gone out to examine and judge for
myself. The better to compare the present with the past, I have
regarded the existing scene merely as a formation—not as
superficies, but as depth; and have sought to ascertain the extent to
which, in different localities, and under different circumstances, it
has overlaid the surface.
The slopes of an ancient forest incline towards a river that flows
sluggishly onwards through a deep alluvial plain, once an extensive
lake. A recent landslip has opened up one of the hanging thickets.
Uprooted trees, mingled with bushes, lie at the foot of the slope,
half buried in broken masses of turf; and we see above a section of
the soil, from the line of vegetation to the bare rock. There is an
under belt of clay, and an upper belt of gravel, neither of which
contains any thing organic; and overtopping the whole we may see a
dark-colored bar of mould, barely a foot in thickness, studded with
stumps and interlaced with roots. Mark that narrow bar: it is the
geological representative of six thousand years. A stony bar of
similar appearance runs through the strata of the Wealden: it, too,
has its dingy color, its stumps, and its interlacing roots; but it forms
only a very inconsiderable portion of one of the least considerable of
all the formations; and yet who shall venture to say that it does not
represent a period as extended as that represented by the dark bar
in the ancient forest, seeing there is not a circumstance of difference
between them?
We descend to the river side. The incessant action of the current
has worn a deep channel through the leaden-colored silt; the banks
stand up perpendicularly over the water, and downwards, for twenty
feet together,—for such is the depth of the deposit,—we may trace
layer after layer of reeds, and flags, and fragments of driftwood, and
find here and there a few fresh-water shells of the existing species.
In this locality, six thousand years are represented by twenty feet.
The depth of the various fossiliferous formations united is at least
fifteen hundred times as great.
We pursue our walk, and pass through a morass. Three tiers of
forest trees appear in the section laid open by the stream, the one
above the other. Overlying these there is a congeries of the remains
of aquatic plants, which must have grown and decayed on the spot
for many ages after the soil had so changed that trees could be
produced by it no longer; and over the whole there occur layers of
mosses, that must have found root on the surface after the waters
had been drained away by the deepening channel of the river. The
six thousand years are here represented by that morass, its three
succeeding forests, its beds of aquatic vegetation, its bands of moss,
and the thin stratum of soil which overlies the whole. Well, but it
forms, notwithstanding, only the mere beginning of a formation. Pile
up twenty such morasses, the one over the other; separate them by
a hundred such bands of alluvial silt as we have just examined a
little higher up the stream; throw in some forty or fifty thick beds of
sand to swell the amount; and the whole together will but barely
equal the Coal Measures, one of many formations.
 But the marine deposits of the present creation have been,
perhaps, accumulating more rapidly than those of our lakes, forests,
or rivers? Yes, unquestionably, in friths and estuaries, in the
neighborhood of streams that drain vast tracts of country, and roll
down the soil and clay swept by the winter rains from thousands of
hill-sides; but what is there to lead to the formation of sudden
deposits in those profounder depths of the sea, in which the water
retains its blue transparency all the year round, let the waves rise as
they may? And do we not know that, along many of our shores, the
process of accumulation is well nigh as slow as on the land itself?
The existing creation is represented in the little land-locked bay,
where the crustacea harbor so thickly, by a deposit hardly three feet
in thickness. In a more exposed locality, on the opposite side of the
promontory, it finds its representative in a deposit of barely nine
inches. It is surely the present scene of things that is in its infancy!
Into how slender a bulk have the organisms of six thousand years
been compressed! History tells us of populous nations, now extinct,
that flourished for ages: do we not find their remains crowded into a
few streets of sepulchres? 'Tis but a thin layer of soil that covers the
ancient plain of Marathon. I have stood on Bannockburn, and seen
no trace of the battle. In what lower stratum shall we set ourselves
to discover the skeletons of the wolves and bears that once infested
our forests? Where shall we find accumulations of the remains of the
wild bisons and gigantic elks, their contemporaries? They must have
existed for but comparatively a short period, or they would surely
have left more marked traces behind them.
When we appeal to the historians, we hear much of a remote
antiquity in the history of man: a more than twilight gloom pervades
the earlier periods; and the distances are exaggerated, as objects
appear large in a fog. We measure, too, by a minute scale. There is
a tacit reference to the threescore and ten years of human life; and
its term of a day appears long to the ephemera. We turn from the
historians to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style
indicating a different speaker. Ezekiel's measuring-reed is graduated
into cubits of the temple. The vast periods of the short-lived
historian dwindled down into weeks and days. Seventy weeks
indicated to Daniel, in the first year of Darius, the time of the
Messiah's coming. Three years and a half limit the term of the
Mohammedan delusion. Seventeen years have not yet gone by since
Adam first arose from the mould; nor has the race, as such, attained
to the maturity of even early manhood. But while prophecy sums up
merely weeks and days, when it refers to the past, it looks forward
into the future, and speaks of a thousand years. Are scales of
unequally graduated parts ever used in measuring different portions
of the same map or section—scales so very unequally graduated,
that, while the parts in some places expand to the natural size, they
are in others more than three hundred times diminished? If not,—for
what save inextricable confusion would result from their use,—how
avoid the conclusion, that the typical scale employed in the same
book by the same prophet represents similar quantities by
corresponding parts, whether applied to times of outrage, delusion,
and calamity, or set off against that long and happy period in which
the spirit of evil shall be bound in chains and darkness, and the
kingdom of Christ shall have come? And if such be the case—if each
single year of the thousand years of the future represents a term as
extended as each single year of the seventeen years of the past—if
the present scene of things be thus merely in its beginning—should
we at all wonder to find that the formation which represents it has
laid down merely its few first strata?
The curtain again rises. A last day had at length come to the
period of the middle formation; and in an ocean roughened by
waves, and agitated by currents, like the ocean which flowed over
the conglomerate base of the system, we find new races of
existences. We may mark the clumsy bulk of the Holoptychius
conspicuous in the group; the shark family have their
representatives as before; a new variety of the Pterichthys spreads
out its spear-like wings at every alarm, like its predecessors of the
lower formation; shoals of fish of a type more common, but still
unnamed and undescribed, sport amid the eddies; and we may see
attached to the rocks below substances of uncouth form and
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