[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.)
[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 membercontains, 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, thefaculty 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 ofdeath 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 fishwhich 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 dayDies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbuesWith 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 WestWith 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?"
[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 dayDies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbuesWith a new color, as it gasps away,The last still loveliest, till—tis gone, and all is gray."
"Parting dayDies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbuesWith 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 WestWith 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?"
"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 WestWith 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 theMagazine of Natural History" says Captain Brown, in one of his notes to White'sSellorne, "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.'"
[BE]"In theMagazine of Natural History" says Captain Brown, in one of his notes to White'sSellorne, "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 ofbrown; 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.
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 theHoloptychius.—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.
Thecurtain 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 ofCephalaspides, 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 withparasitical 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 principlesof 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 aformation—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 theancient 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 theHoloptychiusconspicuous in the group; the shark family have their representatives as before; a new variety of thePterichthysspreads 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 doubtful structure, with which the oryctologist has still to acquaint himself. The depositions of this upper ocean are of a mixed character: the beds are less uniform and continuous than at a greater depth. In some places they consist exclusively of sandstone, in others of conglomerate; and yet the sandstone and conglomerate seem, from their frequent occurrence on the same platform, to have been formed simultaneously. The transporting and depositing agents must have become more partial in their action than during the earlier period. They had their foci of strength and their circumferences of comparative weakness; and while the heavier pebbles which composed the conglomerate were in the course of being deposited in the foci, the lighter sand which composes the sandstone was settling in those outer skirts by which the foci were surrounded. At this stage, too, there are unequivocal marks, in the northern localities, of extensive denudation. The older strata are cut away in some places to a considerable depth, and newer strata of the same formation deposited unconformably over them. There must have been partial upheavings and depressions, corresponding with the partial character ofthe depositions; and, as a necessary consequence, frequent shiftings of currents. The ocean, too, seems to have lessened its general depth, and the bottom to have lain more exposed to the influence of the waves. And hence one cause, added to the porous nature of the matrix, and the diffused oxide, of the detached, and, if I may so express myself, churchyard character of its organisms.
Above the blended conglomerates and sandstones of this band a deposition of lime took place. Thermal springs, charged with calcareous matter slightly mixed with silex, seem to have abounded, during the period which it represents, over widely-extended areas; and hence, probably, its origin. An increase of heat from beneath, through some new activity imparted to the Plutonic agencies, would be of itself sufficient to account for the formation. I have resided in a district in which almost every spring was charged with calcareous earth; but in cisterns or draw-wells, or the utensils in which the housewife stored up for use the water which these supplied, no deposition took place. With boilers and tea-kettles, however, the case was different. The agency of heat was brought to operate upon these; and their sides and bottoms were covered, in consequence, with a thick crust of lime. Now, we have but to apply the simple principles on which such phenomena occur, to account for widely-spread precipitates of the same earth by either springs or seas, which at a lower temperature would have been active in the formation of mechanical deposits alone. The temperature sunk gradually to its former state; the purely chemical deposit ceased; the waters became populous as before with animals of the same character and appearance as those of the upper conglomerate; and layer after layer of yellow sandstone, to the depth of several hundred feet, were formed asthe period passed. With this upper deposit the system terminated.
Though fish still remained the lords of creation, and fish of apparently no superior order to those with which the vertebrata began at least three formations earlier, they had mightily advanced in one striking particular. If their organization was in no degree more perfect than at first, their bulk at least had become immensely more great. The period had gone by in which a mediocrity of dimension characterized the existences of the ancient oceans, and fish armed offensively and defensively with scales and teeth scarcely inferior in size to the scales and teeth of the gavial or the alligator, sprung into existence. It must have been a large jaw and a large head that contained, doubtless among many others, a tooth an inch in diameter at the base. I may remark, in the passing, that most of the teeth found in the several formations of the system are not instruments of mastication, but, like those in most of the existing fish, mere hooks for penetrating slippery substances, and thus holding them fast. The rude angler who first fashioned a crooked bone, or a bit of native silver or copper, into a hook, might have found his invention anticipated in the jaws of the first fish he drew ashore by its means; and we find the hook structure as complete in the earlier ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone as in the fish that exist now. The evidence of the geologist is of necessity circumstantial evidence, and he need look for none other; but it is interesting to observe how directly the separate facts bear, in many examples, on one and the same point. The hooked and slender teeth tell exactly the same story with the undigested scales in the fœcal remains alluded to in an early chapter.
In what could this increase in bulk have originated? Is there a high but yet comparatively medium temperature inwhich animals attain their greatest size, and corresponding gradations of descent on both sides, whether we increase the heat until we reach the point at which life can no longer exist, or diminish it until we arrive at the same result from intensity of cold? The line of existence bisects on both sides the line of extinction. May it not probably form a curve, descending equally from an elevated centre to the points of bisection on the level of death? But whatever may have been the cause, the change furnishes another instance of analogy between the progress of individuals and of orders. The shark and the sword-fish begin to exist as little creatures of a span in length; they expand into monsters whose bodies equal in hugeness the trunks of ancient oaks; and thus has it been with the order to which they belong. The teeth, spines, and palatal bones of the fish of the Upper Ludlow Rocks are of almost microscopic minuteness; an invariable mediocrity of dimension characterizes the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; a marked increase in size takes place among the existences of the middle formation; in the upper the bulkyHoloptychiusappears; the close of the system ushers in the still bulkier Megalichthys; and low in the Coal Measures we find the ponderous bones, buckler-like scales, and enormous teeth of another and immensely more giganticHoloptychius—a creature pronounced by Agassiz the largest of all osseous fish.[BF]We begin with an age of dwarfs—we end with an age of giants. The march of Nature is an onward and an ascending march; the stages are slow, but the tread is stately; and to Him who has commanded, and who overlooks it, a thousand years are as but a single day, and a single day as a thousand years.[BG]
[BF]There have been fish scales found in Burdie House five inches in length, by rather more than four in breadth. Of the giganticHoloptychiusof this deposit we have still much to learn. The fragment of a jaw, in the possession of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which belonged to an individual of the species, is 18-1/2 inches in length; and it is furnished with teeth, one of which, from base to point, measures five inches, and another four and a half.
[BF]There have been fish scales found in Burdie House five inches in length, by rather more than four in breadth. Of the giganticHoloptychiusof this deposit we have still much to learn. The fragment of a jaw, in the possession of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which belonged to an individual of the species, is 18-1/2 inches in length; and it is furnished with teeth, one of which, from base to point, measures five inches, and another four and a half.
[BG]See, on this subject, the introductory note to the present edition, and notep. 154.
[BG]See, on this subject, the introductory note to the present edition, and notep. 154.
We have entered the Coal Measures. For seven formations together—from the Lower Silurian to the Upper Old Red Sandstone—our course has lain over oceans without a visible shore, though, like Columbus, in his voyage of discovery, we have now and then found a little floating weed, to indicate the approaching coast. The water is fast shallowing. Yonder passes a broken branch, with the leaves still unwithered; and there floats a tuft of fern. Land, from the mast-head! land! land!—a low shore, thickly covered with vegetation. Huge trees, of wonderful form, stand out far into the water. There seems no intervening beach. A thick hedge of reeds, tall as the masts of pinnaces, runs along the deeper bays, like water-flags at the edge of a lake. A river of vast volume comes rolling from the interior, darkening the water for leagues with its slime and mud, and bearing with it, to the open sea, reeds, and fern, and cones of the pine, and immense floats of leaves, and now and then some bulky tree, undermined and uprooted by the current. We near the coast, and now enter the opening of the stream. A scarce penetrable phalanx of reeds, that attain to the height and well nigh the bulk of forest trees, is ranged on either hand. The bright and glossy stems seem rodded like Gothic columns; the pointed leaves stand out green at every joint, tier above tier, each tier resembling a coronal wreath or an ancient crown, with the rays turned outwards; and we see a-topwhat may be either large spikes or catkins. What strange forms of vegetable life appear in the forest behind! Can that be a club-moss that raises its slender height for more than fifty feet from the soil? Or can these tall, palm-like trees be actually ferns, and these spreading branches mere fronds? And then these gigantic reeds!—are they not mere varieties of the common horse-tail of our bogs and morasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulliver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods of twenty years' growth, and lost himself amid a forest of corn, fifty feet in height? The lesser vegetation of our own country, reeds, mosses, and ferns, seems here as if viewed through a microscope: the dwarfs have sprung up into giants, and yet there appears to be no proportional increase in size among what are unequivocally its trees. Yonder is a group of what seem to be pines—tall and bulky, 'tis true, but neither taller nor bulkier than the pines of Norway and America; and the club-moss behind shoots up its green, hairy arms, loaded with what seems catkins above their topmost cones. But what monster of the vegetable world comes floating down the stream—now circling round in the eddies, now dancing on the ripple, now shooting down the rapid? It resembles a gigantic star-fish, or an immense coach-wheel, divested of the rim. There is a green, dome-like mass in the centre, that corresponds to the nave of the wheel, or the body of the star-fish; and the boughs shoot out horizontally on every side, like spokes from the nave, or rays from the central body. The diameter considerably exceeds forty feet; the branches, originally of a deep green, are assuming the golden tinge of decay; the cylindrical and hollow leaves stand out thick on every side, like prickles of the wild rose on the red, fleshy, lance-like shoots of a year's growth, that willbe covered, two seasons hence, with flowers and fruit. That strangely formed organism presents no existing type among all the numerous families of the vegetable kingdom. There is an amazing luxuriance of growth all around us. Scarce can the current make way through the thickets of aquatic plants that rise thick from the muddy bottom; and though the sunshine falls bright on the upper boughs of the tangled forest beyond, not a ray penetrates the more than twilight gloom that broods over the marshy platform below. The rank steam of decaying vegetation forms a thick blue haze, that partially obscures the underwood; deadly lakes of carbonic acid gas have accumulated in the hollows; there is silence all around, uninterrupted save by the sudden splash of some reptile fish that has risen to the surface in pursuit of its prey, or when a sudden breeze stirs the hot air, and shakes the fronds of the giant ferns or the catkins of the reeds. The wide continent before us is a continent devoid of animal life, save that its pools and rivers abound in fish and mollusca, and that millions and tens of millions of the infusory tribes swarm in the bogs and marshes. Here and there, too, an insect of strange form flutters among the leaves. It is more than probable that no creature furnished with lungs of the more perfect construction could have breathed the atmosphere of this early period, and have lived.
Doubts have been entertained whether the limestone of Burdie House belongs to the Upper Old Red Sandstone or to the inferior Coal Measures. And the fact may yet come to be quoted as a very direct proof of the ignorance which obtained regarding the fossils of the older formation, at a time when the organisms of most of the other formations, both above and below it, had been carefully explored. The Limestone of Burdie House is unequivocally and most characteristically a Coal Measure limestone. It abounds in vegetableremains of terrestrial or lacustrine growth, and these, too, the vegetables common to the Coal Measures—ferns, reeds, and club-mosses. One can scarce detach a fragment from the mass, that has not its leaflet or seed-cone enclosed, and in a state of such perfect preservation, that there can be no possibility of mistaking its character. If in reality a marine deposit, it must have been formed in the immediate neighborhood of a land covered with vegetation. The dove set loose by Noah bore not back with it a less equivocal sign that the waters had abated. Now, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone none of these plants occur. The deposit is exclusively an ocean deposit, and the remains in Scotland, until we arrive at its inferior and middle formations, are exclusively animal remains. Its upper member, "the yellow sandstone," says Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, "does not exhibit a single particle of carbonaceous matter—no trace or film of a branch having been detected in it, though, if such in reality existed, there are not wanting opportunities of obtaining specimens in some one of the twenty or thirty quarries which have been opened in the county of Fife in this deposit alone." No two bordering formations in the geological scale have their boundaries better defined by the character of their fossils than the Old Red Sandstone and the Coal Measures.
We pursue our history no further. Its after course is comparatively well known. The huge sauroid fish was succeeded by the equally huge reptile—the reptile by the bird—the bird by the marsupial quadruped; and at length, after races higher in the scale of instinct had taken precedence in succession, the one of the other, the sagacious elephant appeared, as the lord of that latest creation which immediately preceded our own. How natural does the thought seem which suggested itself to the profound mind of Cuvier, when indulging in a similar review! Has the last scene in theseries arisen, or has Deity expended his infinitude of resource, and reached the ultimate stage of progression at which perfection can arrive? The philosopher hesitated, and then decided in the negative, for he was too intimately acquainted with the works of the Omnipotent Creator to think of limiting his power; and he could, therefore, anticipate a coming period in which man would have to resign his post of honor to some nobler and wiser creature—the monarch of a better and happier world. How well it is, to be permitted to indulge in the expansion of Cuvier's thought, without sharing in the melancholy of Cuvier's feeling—to be enabled to look forward to the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, not in terror, but in hope—to be encouraged to believe in the system of unending progression, but to entertain no fear of the degradation or deposition of man! The adorable Monarch of the future, with all its unsummed perfection, has already passed into the heavens, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone, and Enoch and Elias are there with him—fit representatives of that dominant race, which no other race shall ever supplant or succeed, and to whose onward and upward march the deep echoes of eternity shall never cease to respond.
FROM
AGASSIZ'S "POISSONS FOSSILES."
∵ The synonymes here—now supplanted, however—with the names of a few doubtful or fictitious species, are given inItalics;—the former opposite the names ultimately adopted, the latter immediately under the names of the determined species.
Acanthodes pusillus.Actinolepis tuberculatus.Asterolepis Asmusii.—Syn.Chelonichthys Asmusii." apicalis." granulata." Hœninghausii." Malcolmsoni." minor.—Syn.Chelonichthys minor." ornata." speciosa."concatenatus."depressus.Bothriolepis favosa.—Syn.Glyptosteus favosus." ornata " "reticulatusByssacanthus arcuatus." crenulatus." lævis.Cephalaspis Lewisii." Lloydii." Lyellii." rostratus.
Cheiracanthus microlepidotus." minor." Murchisoni.Cheirolepis Cummingiæ." Traillii." Uragus."splendens."unilateralis.Chelyophorus pustulatus." Verneuilii.Cladodus simplex.Climatius reticulatus.Coccosteus cuspidatus." decipiens.—Syn.latus." maximus." oblongus.Cosmacanthus Malcolmsoni.Cricodus incurvus.—Syn.Dendrodus incurvus.Ctenacanthus ornatus." serrulatus.Ctenodus Keyserlingii." marginalis." parvulus." Worthii."radiatus."serratus.Ctenoptychius priscus.Dendrodus latus." minor." sigmoides." strigatus." tenuistriatus.Diplacanthus crassispinus." longispinus." striatulus." striatus.Diplopterus affinis.Diplopterus borealis.—Syn.Agassizii." macrocephalus.Dipterus macrolepidotus."arenaceus."brachypygopterus."macropygopterus."Valenciennesii.Glyptolepis elegans." leptopterus." microlepidotus.Glyptopomus minor.—Syn.Platygnathus minor.Haplacanthus marginalis.Holoptychius Andersoni." Flemingii." giganteus." Murchisoni." nobilissimus." Omaliusii.Homacanthus arcuatus.Homothorax Flemingii.Lamnodus biporcatus.—Syn.Dendrodus biporcatus." hastatus.—Syn.Panderi. Dendrodus hastatus, compressus." sulcatus.Narcodes pustilifer.Naulas sulcatus.Odontacanthus crenatus.—Syn.Ctenoptychius crenatus." heterodon.Onchus heterogyrus." semistriatus." sublævis.Osteolepis arenatus." macrolepidotus" major." microlepidotus."intermedius."nanus.Pamphractus Andersoni.Pamphractus hydrophilus.—Syn.Pterichthys hydrophilius.Parexus rccurvus.Phyllolepis concentricus.Placothorax paradoxus.Platygnathus Jamesoni." paucidens.Polyphractus platycephalus.Psammosteus arenatus.—Syn.Placosteus arenatus." mæandrinus. " "mæandrinus." paradoxus. "Psammolepis paradoxus." undulatus. "Placosteus undulatus.Pterichthys arenatus." cancriformis." cornutus." major." Milleri." latus." oblongus." productus." testudinarius.Ptychacanthus dubius.Stagonolepis Robertsoni.
THE END.
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FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR;
— OR —
THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS.
BY HUGH MILLER.
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS.
FROM THE THIRD LONDON EDITION.—WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR
BY LOUIS AGASSIZ.
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FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR.