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BASALTIC COLUMNS AT REGIA, IN MEXICO

GEOLOGICAL FACTS;
OR,
THE CRUST OF THE EARTH,
WHAT IT IS,
AND WHAT ARE ITS USES.

BY

THE REV. W. G. BARRETT,

ROYSTON.

“There is in this universe a stair, or manifest scale of creatures, rising not disorderly nor in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion.”—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1642.

LONDON:

ARTHUR HALL, VIRTUE, & CO.

25, PATERNOSTER ROW.

1855.

LONDON:

R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL

PREFACE.

Last written, and generally last read, a Preface has nevertheless become so integral a part of every book, that I may presume, I trust, upon the attention of my readers while I ask them to indulge me with a little prefatory egotism.

This book of mine goes forth into the world with many misgivings on the part of its author. How he came to write it was thus-wise. He was settled in a quiet country town in Cambridgeshire, Royston to wit, as a Dissenting Minister; around him he found a number of young persons, who did not believe they had “finished their education” because they had left school, and who were anxious to avoid the usual littleness and small talk of such towns, by earnest attention to actual study. And so it came to pass that a Geological class was formed, which, meeting every week, afforded real stimulus for private work, and led to the consultation of the best standard works, happily available through the well-conditioned library of the town.

The result of those classes is this little book. What is written here was mostly, if not all, said there; and, urged to publish, the author feels a pleasure in dedicating this book to the class, composed almost entirely of young ladies, who found in these studies one of their chief delights, and whose private collections have been greatly assisted by the hints thus obtained.

I do not pretend to teach the Science of Geology; I aspire simply to give a taste for this noble and elevating physical study; and, imperfect as this little manual, written in the few hours of capricious leisure snatched from an incessant strain of engagements, must be, I shall only be too happy, if one and another lay aside my book, and go up higher to Lyell, Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Ansted, Miller, and others.

Possibly my stand-point as a minister of religion may have given unconsciously a too theological tone to some of the chapters, especially the last; if such is the case, I beg leave to apologise for such an error by the candid statement, that I have come into contact frequently with minds who have not hesitated to express the doubts I have endeavoured to resolve.

I am quite sure that if we, whose calling is with the greatest and the deepest truths that can touch the heart of the real world in which we live and move and have our being, encourage those whom we meet in the free intercourse of social life, to express their doubts, however painful the form of that expression may sometimes be, we shall be far better prepared to meet the wants of our age than if we shut ourselves up in our studies, and exclude ourselves by conventional devices from God’s great world of thought and action that is vibrating so palpably around us, many of whose most painful throbs are occasioned by a supposed contradiction between Science and Scripture.

At the feet of the Master I desire to serve, I lay this little book, beseeching Him to regard it as a labour of love, and to use it as an aid to the faith of others in the inspired books of Nature and of Revelation.

Removed from the happy town where this book was written, it only remains to add, that for many of the fossils figured in the following pages I am indebted to the kindness of the Rev. Mr. Meeke, at that time the Unitarian Minister of Royston, whose cabinet was always open to my use, and whose courtesy and catholic kindness I thus desire to record; while to Miss Butler, one of my Geological class, I am indebted for all the drawings and devices which will doubtless make this book more attractive than it could otherwise have been.

In the words of Archdeacon Hare, I close this brief prelection: “So imperfectly do we yet understand the redemption wrought for us by Christ; and so obstinate are we in separating what God has united, as though it were impossible for the Tree of Knowledge to stand beside the Tree of Life. Yet in the redeemed world they do stand side by side, and their arms intermingle and intertwine, so that no one can walk under the shade of the one, but he will also be under the shade of the other.”

W. G. B.

Manchester,

July, 1855.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

BY S. & G. NICHOLLS.

GEOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Moses.

Geology is the history of the crust of this planet. This history we compile, not from old records or moth-eaten state papers, not from antiquarian research or the study of ancient coins, but from actual and painstaking examination of the materials composing this crust. How suitable is this word crust, will be seen at once, when it is considered that its thickness in all probability does not exceed eighty miles, a mere fraction of the distance to the earth’s centre. Of this eighty miles we know pretty accurately the character and arrangement of some seven or eight miles; not that we have ever penetrated so far beneath the surface in a straight line, the deepest mines not exceeding 1800 or 1900 feet; but, by putting together the thicknesses of the various strata, with which we are well acquainted, we reach this conclusion without much hesitation. Professor Whewell has well observed, that “an earth greater or smaller, denser or rarer, than the one on which we live, would require a change in the structure and strength of all the little flowers that hang their heads under our hedges. There is something curious in thus considering the whole mass from pole to pole and from circumference to centre, as employed in keeping a snowdrop in the position most suited to its vegetable health.”[^[1]] When we come to examine this crust, several appearances of a striking character reward our toil. At first, and before we proceed in our investigations more minutely, we find that there are only two varieties of rocks in all the vast arrangements spread out before us. Some rocks we find to be unstratified, and others we find to be stratified: from the absence of all fossils in the former of these, and from their crystalline character, we conclude that these were formed by the action of fire, and therefore we call them Igneous or Plutonic rocks. From the sedimentary character and from the numerous fossils of the stratified rocks, we conclude these to have been formed by the action of water, and we therefore call these Aqueous or Neptunian rocks. Following out these investigations, we meet with other facts equally interesting: we find that the Plutonic or unstratified rocks lie generally at the base of all the others, and that where they come up to the surface and crop out from other rocks, or rise in towering mountain heights above them, this has been the result of igneous action from beneath, and that this elevation has disturbed the surrounding strata from the horizontal position in which we imagine them to have been first arranged. The extent of the Plutonic rocks is immense; in Europe, the Scandinavian mountains, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Carpathians; in Asia, the Himalayan, the Caucasian, and the Altai mountains; in Africa, the Atlas mountains and the Cape of Good Hope; in America, nearly the whole of the two continents, and in Australia, its southern part;—all these wide regions of the globe are composed of those igneous or Plutonic rocks to which we give the names of granite, basalt, porphyry, trap, &c. &c. Finding the surrounding strata disturbed by depression, or upheaval in consequence of the giant claims of these older rocks that appear to have risen out of the centre of the earth in a red-hot or semifluid condition, and then suddenly to have cooled down, we begin to examine this upper and sedimentary strata, and here the most delightful and romantic results are obtained. We find no two courses or formations in these sedimentary rocks alike. Rising up from the granite, we meet in the clay strata corals and trilobites, the first fossil forms of ancient life with which we are acquainted: we rise higher still, for our imaginary start is from the bottom of the earth’s crust, and we meet in other rocks fossil fishes of an extraordinary shape, and once, doubtless, possessed of extraordinary functions; higher yet, and touching the coal measures, we come to vast forests of palms and ferns, that by chemical changes and mechanical pressure have been converted into our mineral coal, the vast fields of which constitute the real diamond mines of Great Britain; higher yet, exploring the Lias and Oolitic groups, the huge remains of ancient saurians (animals of the lizard species) fill us with awe and wonder, and make us rejoice that they had no successors in the next strata; higher yet, and we reach the last period of the earth’s history, previous to the introduction of man, and enormous “four-footed beasts,” the mastodon, the megatherium and others, astonish us by their gigantic proportions, and evidently herbivorous habits; and last of all we rise to the surface and breathe freely in company with our fellow man, made in the image of God, to inhabit this world as his palace, and to interpret its mysteries as its priest.

We may probably put these general results into a more popular form,—for we reserve the details to a seriatim examination of each formation,—by the following quotation from a modern and extensively useful writer: “We distinguish four ages of nature, corresponding to the great geological divisions, namely—

“1. The primary or palæozoic[^[2]] age, comprising the Lower Silurian, the Upper Silurian, and the Devonian. During this age there were no air-breathing animals. The fishes were the masters of creation. We may therefore call it the Reign of Fishes.

“2. The secondary age, comprising the carboniferous formation, the trias, the oolitic, and the cretaceous formations. This is the epoch in which air-breathing animals first appear. The reptiles predominate over the other classes, and we may therefore call it the Reign of Reptiles.

“3. The tertiary age, comprising the tertiary formations. During this age, terrestrial mammals of great size abound. This is the Reign of Mammals.

“4. The modern age, characterized by the appearance of the most perfect of created beings. This is the Reign of Man.”[^[3]]

From this brief but necessary outline of “the treasures of the deep” which lie before us we may proceed to make a few preliminary remarks on the moral and theological aspects of this science. Many persons have supposed that the statements of Scripture and the alleged facts of Geology are at variance, and, forgetful that some of the devoutest minds of this and other countries have been equal believers in both, have too summarily dismissed geology from their notice as a study likely to lead to infidelity. To such we would briefly remark, that it is utterly impossible there can be any contradiction between the written volume of Inspiration and the outspread volume of Creation. Both are books written by the same hand, both are works proceeding from the same ever blessed and beneficent Creator. We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and we believe equally in the plenary inspiration of Nature; both are full of God, for in them both He is all and in all; and he who is the deepest and the most reverent student of both will not be long before he comes to the conclusion that not only is there no disharmony, no discrepancy and no contradiction between them, but that they are both harmonious utterances of the one infinite and ever blessed God.

“In reason’s ear they both rejoice,

And utter forth a glorious voice;

For ever singing as they shine,

‘The hand that made us is divine.’”

Let us remember that Geology has nothing to do with the history of man, nor with God’s government of man; to the Bible, and only there, do we go for information on these points. Geology gives us the history and the succession of the things and beings that were created and made, we believe, incalculable ages before man was placed on the face of the earth. Possibly at times some new discovery in geology may appear to contradict our long received interpretations of isolated passages in Scripture, in which case the modesty of science compels us to reexamine our data, while our reverence for the word of God teaches us to revise our interpretations. As Dr. Chalmers once remarked, “the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe; if they fix anything at all, it is only the antiquity of the species.” We believe that the same God who, in anticipation of the spiritual wants of the human race, graciously promised from the beginning of man’s transgression, that “the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head,” laid up for him “in the bowels of the earth those vast stores of granite, marble, coal, salt, and the various metals, the products of its several revolutions; and thus was an inexhaustible provision made for his necessities, and for the developments of his genius, ages in anticipation of his appearance.”[^[4]]

Truth is, and always must be, coincident. There can be no real contradiction between the truth of Scripture and the truth of Science. Whatever is true in one department of God’s agency, must be true when compared with his works in any other department. As an illustration we may notice one particular in which Geology and Scripture move towards the same point in proving the recent introduction of man. We take up a chart of the earth’s crust, and examine it so far as that crust is open to our investigation: eight miles depth or height we know pretty accurately, and in all these accumulations we find one concurrent testimony. If we take the Azoic period of the earth’s crust, and search through the granitic rocks of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall; or if we pass on to the Palæozoic period, and examine the Old Red Sandstone, the Carboniferous system, or other formations; or, extending our researches, investigate the secondary formations, the Lias, the Oolite, and the Chalk, and so on until we arrive at the Tertiary period of the earth’s history; all the testimony is one; there is no contradiction; there are no fossil boats or sofas; no fossil beds or books; no fossil boys and girls; no fossil knives and forks; so far as the teachings of Geology go throughout all these vast periods it says, “there was not a man to till the earth;” they declare that man is not so old as the earth, and that all its fossil remains are pre-Adamite.

Now why should this truth be supposed to lie against the teaching of Scripture? The object of Moses in the first chapter of Genesis, is to teach us that all existing matter owes its origin to the God of the Bible, and not to any of the idols of the heathen. “In the beginning,” says that oldest historical record with which we are acquainted, “God created the heaven and the earth;” that is, we apprehend, at some period of the earth’s history, in all probability an undefined and incalculable distance from the present time, God created all matter out of nothing, the universe, these heavens and this earth, began to be at the word of God.

“But afterwards,” says Dr. Pye Smith, in his translation of these words, “the earth was without form and void;” undergoing, we believe, those vast geological changes, those deposits of metal, and those slow accumulations of mineral wealth, by which it was fitted to become the temple, the palace, the workshop, and the home of man. “The first sentence in Genesis is a simple, independent, all-comprehending axiom to this effect, that matter elementary or combined, aggregated only or organised, and dependent, sentient, and intellectual beings, have not existed from eternity either in self-continuity or succession; but had a beginning; that their beginning took place by the all-powerful will of one Being, the Self-existent, Independent and Infinite in all perfection; and that the date of that beginning is not made known.”[^[5]]

Dr. Redford says, “We ought to understand Moses as saying, that indefinitely far back and concealed from us in the mystery of eternal ages prior to the first moment of mundane time, God created the heavens and the earth;” and Dr. Harris in the same strain writes thus, “The first verse in Genesis was designed by the Divine Spirit to announce the absolute origination of the material universe by the Almighty Creator; and it is so understood in the other parts of holy writ; passing by an indefinite interval, the second verse describes the state of our planet immediately prior to the Adamic creation, and the third verse begins the account of the six days’ work.”

On this subject we will quote but one brief sentence more—and we have preferred using these quotations to stating the question in our words, thoroughly accordant as they would have been. In Dr. Hitchcock’s valuable work, entitled “The Religion of Geology,” he says, “The time is not far distant when the high antiquity of the globe will be regarded as no more opposed to the Bible than the earth’s revolution round the sun and on its axis. Soon shall the horizon where Geology and Revelation meet be cleared of every cloud, and present only an unbroken and magnificent circle of truth.”

Let these thoughts be borne in mind while we pursue our examination of the solid crust of this globe. We do not

“drill and bore

The solid earth, and from its strata thence

Extract a register, by which we learn

That He who made it and revealed its date

To Moses was mistaken in its age.”

Nowhere do we find the age of the globe revealed either to Moses or any other inspired writer; we believe that as science has nothing to fear from the Bible, so the Bible has nothing to fear from the widest intellectual range of study. We ponder in devout amazement over these unwritten records of the earth’s bygone history: we find ‘sermons in stones’ as we light on some delicate fern, or elegant vertebrate animal, preserved in the deposits of past ages, and the hieroglyphics of nature and the distincter utterances of the Bible prompt the same exclamation,—“How marvellous are thy works, O God, in wisdom hast thou made them all!” “Waste, and disorder, and confusion we nowhere find in our study of the crust of the earth; instead of this we find endless examples of economy, order, and design; and the result of all our researches carried back through the unwritten records of past time, has been to fix more steadily our assurance of the existence of one Supreme Creator of all things; to exalt more highly our conviction of the immensity of His perfections, of His might and majesty, His wisdom and His goodness, and all-sustaining providence; and to penetrate our understandings with a profound and sensible perception of the high veneration man’s intellect owes to God. The earth from her deep foundations unites with the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space, to declare the glory and show forth the praise of their common Author and Preserver; and the voice of natural religion accords harmoniously with the testimonies of revelation, in ascribing the origin of the universe to the will of one Eternal and Dominant Intelligence, the Almighty Lord and supreme First Cause of all things that subsist; the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, God from everlasting and world without end.”—Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise.

“Come, frankly read the rocks, and see

In them the Earth’s biography;

Let mountain piled on mountain tell

Its antique age; and every shell

In fossil form its tale unfold,

Of life’s bright day through time untold;

And gathering use from great and small,

See good in each, but God in all.”

CHAPTER II.
PRELIMINARIES.

“Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth.”

David.

As yet we have only been talking about the crust of the earth; we shall now return and enter upon its actual examination. It will not be necessary for us personally to descend into the abysmous caverns that lie beneath our feet, nor, with hammer in hand, to go forth and explore the district of country in which we may happen to dwell: we may do all this by and by, when we know both how and what to observe. Meanwhile, with such teachers as Buckland, Sedgwick, Murchison, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, De la Beche, Lyell, Owen and others, we may for some while to come be only tarry-at-home travellers; for in a true sense, in this department of knowledge, “other men have laboured, and we enter into their labours.” Let us now look at the crust of the earth, as it may be represented in two imaginary sections. Suppose we could make a vertical section of the earth’s crust, and cut straight down some eighty miles till we reached the central mass of incandescence that we believe lies beneath this crust, or Erdrinde (earth-rind), as the Germans call it, and then bring out this section to daylight, it would present something very much like the following appearance.

DIAGRAM I.

Here the granite A will be observed forming the supposed boundary between the superlying strata and the fire B below to which we have just referred, and thus will be seen the origin of all plutonic rocks. Here too will be seen how the granite is not confined to the lower levels, but rises, as mentioned in the first chapter, far above all the other strata, and forms some of the highest peaks on the face of the globe.[^[6]] Here, too, will be seen how the granite is frequently traversed by veins of trap-dykes, those black-looking branches, which rise often above the whole mass of metamorphic and stratified rocks, often occasioning great difficulties in mining operations. Here, too, the student will see how, supposing the theory of a central globe of heat to be founded in fact, the volcanoes that are now active, C, form, as the volcanoes that are extinct, D, once did, the safety valves of this mighty mass of incandescence, B; and in the same way may be seen how certain strata may be above the granite, or above any other formation, though they do not overlie them, and how the lowest strata, being formed first, is said to be older than any superlying strata, notwithstanding any accidental arrangement produced by upheaval or depression. For, in “consequence of the great commotions which the crust of the globe has undergone, many points of its surface have been elevated to great heights in the form of mountains; and hence it is that fossils are sometimes found at the summit of the highest mountains, though the rocks containing them were originally formed at the bottom of the sea. But, even when folded or partly broken, their relative age may still be determined by an examination of the ends of their upturned strata, where they appear or crop out in succession, at the surface or on the slopes of mountains.”[^[7]]

But to make this view of the subject clearer, let us imagine that some Titanic power was granted us to push down these towering masses of granite to their original situation, below the metamorphic and stratified rocks, by which means we should at the same time restore these curved and broken strata to their originally horizontal position; and let us suppose that we were now again to descend to the foundations of the earth for the purpose of making another vertical section; then the crust of the earth would present to us an arrangement something like the leaves of a book, or the coats of an onion, arranged in successive and uninterrupted layers, or in concentric and unbroken circles. Such a diagram must of course be imaginary, and unless it is taken into connexion with the previous remarks, it is more likely to bewilder than to assist the beginner. Let it again be urged upon the reader, that such a chart as we are about to lay before him is only intended to give him an idea of the succession of these formations and systems, and that the details found in it are anticipatory of many future references to it on the student’s part. Let it not be supposed that this is a mere barren research into dry facts that have no connexion with our truest welfare; for if, as Lord Bacon somewhere finely observes, all study is to be valued “not so mush as an exercise of the intellect, but as a true discipline of humanity,” then what study is calculated to be more useful than Geology, in enlarging and purifying the powers of the mind, by teaching us how harmonious, and orderly, and economic are the works of God; in removing all narrow notions of the extent and age of this solid globe, which from the beginning had its origin in the almighty will of God; in checking the presumptuous or the chilling inferences of a sceptical philosophy, by everywhere pointing out the design, skill, and adaptations of an ever-present and most beneficent Creator; and in chastening those overweening ideas of ourselves which both ignorance and knowledge may create and foster, by saying to us, in the language of God himself, as we stand amazed in the presence of huge pre-Adamite vestiges of creation, “Where wast thou,” vain man, “when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding.” (Job xxxviii. 4.)

“Among these rocks and stones, methinks I see

More than the heedless impress that belongs

To lonely nature’s casual work; they bear

A semblance strange to Power intelligent,

And of Design not wholly worn away.

And I own

Some shadowy intimations haunt me here,

That in these shows a chronicle survives

Of purposes akin to those of man,

Measuring through all degrees, until the scale

Of time and conscious nature disappear,

Lost in unsearchable eternity.”—Wordsworth.

We will now proceed to the diagram to which we have made allusion, and which represents an ideal section of the earth’s crust as the various formations are there found arranged. (Diagram II.)

DIAGRAM II.

Here, in the words of another writer, we would add for the reader’s guidance, that “the unstratified or igneous rocks occur in no regular succession, but appear amidst the stratified without order or arrangement; heaving them out of their original horizontal positions, breaking up through them in volcanic masses, and sometimes overrunning them after the manner of liquid lava. From these circumstances they are, in general, better known by their mineral composition than by their order of occurrence. Still it may be convenient to divide them into three great classes; granite, trappean, and volcanic—granite being the basis of all known rocks, and occurring along with the primary and transition strata; the trappean, of a darker and less crystalline structure than the granite, and occurring along with the secondary and tertiary rocks; and the volcanic, still less crystalline and compact, and of comparatively recent origin, or still in process of formation.” This the student will observe by another reference to the previous diagram; but, in looking at the one now before him, we must also add for his further guidance,—for we are presuming that we address those who need initiation into the rudiments of this science, and the circumstance that we never met with a preliminary treatise that quite satisfied us, or helped such intelligent youth as were prying into the apparently cabalistic mysteries of the earth’s structural divisions, is one strong inducement to the present undertaking;—we must add, that “it must not be supposed, however, that all the stratified rocks always occur in any one portion of the earth’s crust in full and complete succession as represented” in Diagram II. “All that is meant is, that such would be their order if every group and formation were present. But whatever number of groups may be present, they never happen out of their regular order of succession; that is, clay-slate never occurs above coal, nor coal above chalk. Thus in London, tertiary strata occupy the surface; in Durham, magnesian limestone; in Fife, the coal measures; and in Perthshire, the old red sandstone and clay-slate; so that it would be fruitless to dig for chalk in Durham, for magnesian limestone in Fife, or for coal in Perthshire. It would not be absurd, however, to dig for coal in Durham, because that mineral underlies the magnesian limestone; or for old red sandstone in Fife, because that formation might be naturally expected to occur under the coal strata of that country, in the regular order of succession.”[^[8]]

Still, after reading all this, we can easily imagine, not so much an air of incredulity taking possession of the countenance of our courteous reader as a feeling somewhat like this, with which we have often come into contact in those geological classes of young persons which it has been our pleasure to conduct: “Well, all that’s very plain in the book; I see granite lies at the bottom, and pushes itself up to the top very often; and I see in the diagrams that coal and chalk are not found in the same place, and that different localities have their different formations, and the various formations have their different fossils, but I confess that I cannot realize it. I know the earth is round like an orange, a little flattened at the poles—what is called an oblate spheroid; but all this surpasses my power of comprehension; can’t you make it plainer?” Well, let us try; on page [27] is a diagram, representing no ideal, but an actual boring into the earth. London is situated on the tertiary formation, in what is called geologically the basin of the London clay, that is almost on the very top of the crust, or external covering that lies on the vast mass of molten and other matter beneath. Here is first a drawing and then a section that may represent this basin:—

DIAGRAM III.

DIAGRAM IV.

The water which falls on the chalk hills flows into them, or into the porous beds adjoining, and would rise upwards to its level but for the superincumbent pressure of the bed of clay above it, cccc. Under these circumstances, in order to procure water, Artesian[^[9]] wells are sunk through the bed of clay, perhaps also through the chalk, but at any rate till the depressed stratum of chalk is reached; and this gives exit to the subterranean water, which at once rises through the iron tubes inserted in the boring to the surface. By these borings through the clay, water is obtained where it would be impossible to sink a well, or where the expense would prohibit the attempt. To explain this matter, here is a diagram (No. V.) which represents the Artesian well at the Model Prison at Pentonville, London, the strata upon which London is built, and which we can apply to the diagram on page [21], that the theory of the earth’s crust may be the more thoroughly understood before we proceed.

DIAGRAM V.

In the same manner Artesian wells have been sunk in other places, as at Hampstead Water Works, 450 feet deep; Combe & Delafield’s, 500 feet deep; and the Trafalgar-square Water Works, 510 feet deep.[^[10]] Now, the reader has only to take this last diagram, and in imagination to apply it to the one on page [21], in order to see that so far as actual boring and investigation go, the geological theory of the earth’s crust is correct; only again let it be observed that this order is never inverted, although it frequently happens that some one or more of the strata may be absent.

Hitherto we have spoken of the earth’s crust without reference to that wondrous succession and development of living beings which once had their joy of life, and whose fossil remains, found in the different strata, waken such kindling emotions of the power of Deity, and enlarge indefinitely our conceptions of the boundless resources of His Mind. This will open before us a new chapter in the history of our planet, already the theatre of such vast revolutions, and which, under the influence of Divine truth, is yet to undergo one greater and nobler than any of these. We have as yet only glanced at the surface page of the wondrous book, now happily opened for us by geologists, to whose names we have already made reference; and as the mind rests with intense pleasure on the discoveries of Champollion, Belzoni, Lane, Layard, Botta, and others who have deciphered the hieroglyphics, in which were written the wars and the chronicles of ancient nations, whose names and deeds are becoming, by books and lectures, and above all by our noble national Museum, familiar even to our children, and a source of help and solace to the hard-toiling artisan; so with profounder interest, as carried back into remoter ages of antiquity, so remote that they seem to lie beyond the power of a human arithmetic to calculate, do we humbly endeavour to decipher the hieroglyphics,[^[11]] not of Egypt or of Nineveh, but of the vast creation of God, written in characters that require, not only learning and science to understand, but modesty, patience, and triumphant perseverance. He who with these pre-requisites combines reverence for God and His revelation, will always find in Geology material both for manly exercise of thought, and also for reverent adoration of Him who is Himself unsearchable, and whose ways are past finding out.

“We not to explore the secrets, ask

Of His eternal empire, but the more

To magnify His works, the more we know.”—Milton.

Most happily for Christendom, our noblest men of science are not ashamed of the “reproach of Christ;” and we know not how to conclude this chapter in a strain more accordant with our own thoughts than by quoting the words of an eminent living naturalist:—“I can echo with fullest truth the experience of Bishop Heber; ‘In every ride I have taken, and in every wilderness in which my tent has been pitched, I have found enough to keep my mind from sinking into the languor and the apathy which have been regarded as natural to a tropical climate.’ Nay, I may truly say, I found no tendency to apathy or ennui. Every excursion presented something to admire; every day had its novelty; the morning was always pregnant with eager expectation; the evening invariably brought subjects of interest fresh and new; and the days were only too short for enjoyment. They were not days of stirring adventure, of dangerous conflicts with man or with beast, or of hair-breadth escapes in flood and field; their delights were calm and peaceful, I trust not unholy, nor unbecoming the character of a Christian, who has his heart in heaven, and who traces, even in earth’s loveliest scenes, the mark of the spoiler. The sentiments expressed by my friend[^[12]] and fellow-labourer are those which I would ever associate with the study of science. ‘If the sight of nature,’ observes Mr. Hill, ‘were merely the looking at a painted pageantry, or at a spectacle filling the carnal mind with wonder and delight, the spirit would be overpowered and worked into weariness; but it is admiration at the wisdom, and reverence for the beneficence of Almighty power. He who dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen, nor can see,’ is yet visible in His perfections through the works of His hand, and His designs are made manifest in the purpose of His creatures. Wherever our lot is cast, into whatever scenes our wayward impulses lead us, the mind-illumined eye gazes on divine things, and the spirit-stirred heart feels its pulses bounding with emotions from the touch of an ever-present Deity. The habit that sees in every object the wisdom and the goodness as well as the power of God, I may speak of, as Coleridge speaks of the poetical spirit, ‘it has been to me an exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared my solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.’

“‘Great are thy works, Jehovah, infinite

Thy power! what thought can measure thee, or tongue

Relate thee?’”[^[13]]

CHAPTER III.
THE ANCIENT EPOCH.

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”—Job xxxviii. 4.

And now in right earnest let us begin our examination of the earth’s crust. Some of the terms we may use will, perhaps, at first sight appear repulsive from their novelty and difficulty; such words we will explain as we proceed, and will only stay the student’s course to remark, that there is a necessity for the use of the dead languages in the formation of compound terms that are to become descriptive names, and in their application to newly discovered objects. This necessity arises from the fact that it is only in this way that scientific men of different nations can understand the character of each other’s researches, and compare notes with one another. A fossil is found, let us suppose, in the lias formation; it proves to be the organic remains of some very strange and anomalous creature. People go down to Lyme Regis to examine it, and, in doing so, discover others. Comparative anatomists arrange the dislocated parts and give them a name; this must be intelligible to geologists on the Continent as well as in England; and therefore some term descriptive of the animal, once the living possessor of these “dry bones,” must be given, and finally it is called ichthyosaurus. Any one in Russia, or Austria, or Italy, who happened to be acquainted with the rudiments of Greek, would know at once the kind of animal referred to by its very name, derived from ichthus, a fish, and sauros, a lizard. This would indicate to all scientific men the nature of this remarkable animal, of which we shall have to tell some stories by and by as full of wonder as any modern or ancient book of marvels; while, if we had called it fish-lizard, only those who understood English would know what we meant. Our object is to simplify as much as possible every difficult term that may be used; but while we solicit our readers to master each difficulty as it rises, we hope they will not think that, when they have read this little book, they are masters of Geology, our highest ambition being only to impart a taste for the science.

To return: our examination commences with the Plutonic rocks, so called in memory of the well-known mythological god of the fiery or infernal regions; and we take granite[^[14]] as a type of these rocks, because it is so familiar to all our readers. There are besides granite, syenite,[^[15]] greenstone, porphyry, basalt, and others, to dilate upon which would defeat our purpose. Our object is to lay but a little at a time upon the memory, and to let that little be well digested before we pass from the thoroughly known to the unknown. Nothing but actual examination can make the student familiar with the varieties of the rocks of this very ancient epoch in the world’s history. Well, everybody knows what granite is; they see it on the kerb-stones of the wayside, in the hard paving of the London streets, in the massive slabs of London and Waterloo Bridges, and elsewhere. “Granite!” exclaims the reader, “everybody knows what granite is, and there is an end of it; you make as much fuss about granite as Wordsworth did about his well-known primrose, and the man who could see nothing but a primrose in a primrose.”

But there is a poetry and a history about granite upon which we are going to dwell. This piece of granite which I hold in my hand is composed of quartz, mica, and feldspar.[^[16]] The quartz is white and hard—I can’t scratch it with my knife; the mica is in glistening plates or scales; and the feldspar is soft and greyish, and can easily be scratched. Oh, if this granite could speak, what a story could it tell! “To give it, then, a tongue were wise in man.” Let us try. “Once upon a time, long, long ages ago, incalculable periods before Adam was placed in possession of Eden, I, the granite, and my contemporaries, came into being. Before us, this planet ‘was without form and void.’ A dark chaotic period, of which I know nothing, preceded me. When I first emerged into being, at the command of Him who laid the foundations of the earth, this world was a barren, lifeless, uncultivated, uninhabited, untrodden, seasonless waste. Here and there were undulations of land and water, but all was bare, desolate, and silent: not a moss nor a lichen covered the ancient skeleton of the globe; not a sea-weed floated in the broad ocean; not a trace existed even of the least highly organized animal or vegetable; everything was still, and with the stillness of universal death. The earth was prepared, and the fiat of creation had gone forth; but there was no inhabitant, and no beings endowed with life had been introduced to perform their part in the great mystery of creation.”[^[17]] And the granite might go on to say—“Man! of three-score years and ten, where wast thou when He, my Maker and yours, laid the foundations of the earth? Let me tell you what an important part I have played in the history of your world’s formation. I rise to the highest elevations, and form the sublimest pinnacles on the surface of the globe, and without me your scenery would lose its grandeur and its glory. But for me Albert Smith had never climbed Mont Blanc, nor Humboldt Cotopaxi and Chimborazo; nor would the head of the famed Egyptian Memnon[^[18]] have been sculptured. You may see me giving to Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland their most valuable minerals and metals. In Europe

‘I am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute.’

The Scandinavians, the Hartz mountains, the Alps, and the Pyrenees are mine; nor is my territory less in Asia, Africa, the great Americas, and in the becoming great Australia; and thus, by my deeply rooted foundations and my vast extension, I constitute the framework, solid and immoveable, of this ‘great globe and all that it inherits.’”

Thus, at any rate, the granite might speak, nor would there be one word of vain boasting in it. Having beard it, or fancied we heard it, which amounts to the same thing, let us soberize ourselves, and put granite into the third person. There are no fossils in granite and the other Plutonic and volcanic rocks; even supposing any forms of life to have been in existence at the period to which we are referring, the action of fire has annihilated all their remains. We should not therefore expect in Cumberland and Cornwall, nor in those parts of Devonshire where granite prevails, to find the fossils peculiar to other formations with which in time we hope to make familiar acquaintance. But though destitute of interest in this respect, how great is its importance and interest in those economic uses which have the geologist for their guide, and the whole family of man for their beneficent operations! “Many varieties of granite are excellent as building stones, though expensive in working to definite forms. Some of the most important public works of Great Britain and Ireland, France and Russia, are of this material. In selecting granite, those varieties in which the constituent minerals and the scales of mica are superabundant, should be avoided; and, as a practical test, it is wise to notice the country immediately around the quarry, as the sandy varieties rapidly disintegrate,[^[19]] and form accumulations of micaceous sand. The Hayter or Dartmoor granite, the Aberdeen granite, the Kingstown (Dublin) granite, some beds of the Mourne or county of Down granite, and the Guernsey or Channel Island granite, are well known for their excellence. In some of the quarries the bedding of the granite is more defined than in others; and wherever this is the case, or where marked cleavages or joints prevail, the work is much facilitated. Many old Egyptian works and statues were formed of granite, and it is still used for colossal works, as it takes a fine polish. For example, the great fountain shell, or vase, before the Museum at Berlin, and the pedestal of Peter the Great at St. Petersburg, are of the northern granite, being sculptured from erratic blocks. The splendid Scotch granite columns, in the vestibule of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, are beautiful examples of a modern application of this rock to the arts.”[^[20]]

It is also in the Plutonic or igneous rocks that almost all the metals are found; and here we have our first illustration of that order to which we shall frequently call attention; an order as exquisite as can be found in the drawers of a lady’s cabinet, forbidding the thought that anything observable at the present time, in the bowels or on the surface of the crust of the earth, can be attributed to the violent diluvial action of the Noachian deluge. The diagram below represents an ideal section of a mining district.

SECTION OF A MINING DISTRICT.

Here the metalliferous vein, we may suppose, has cropped out on the surface of the ground, or, as the miners say, has “come above grass.” Let us now suppose that the position of this vein of ore, copper, lead, or tin, has been ascertained—that is, how it runs, whether from north to south, or from east to west—and also that the “captains” of the mining district around have given their opinion as to the extent and thickness of this underground vein. The next thing is to obtain this mineral wealth. For this purpose shafts (a a a a) must be sunk, which must reach the vein at a certain depth; then will probably follow cross-cuts (c c c), called adit levels (technically an “additt”), driven, as may be seen, at the lowest convenient point above the level of the highest water of the valley; and these, in connexion with the shaft, will serve the purpose of draining the mine and carrying the ore above ground. It will also be seen, by reference to the diagram, that the shafts of a mine do not always correspond; sometimes they are sunk vertically to meet the vein, sometimes they are commenced in the very outcrop itself. On this matter the best geological lesson is a visit to Cornwall, where the student will see that everything depends on the locality of a mine, the nature of the slope of the hill, or the character of the rock in which the vein appears, and so on. “The act of sinking a perpendicular shaft downwards to a depth where it is calculated the lode should be cut, may seem to require little further skill than is necessary to determine correctly the spot on the surface where the work is to commence. But the process in this way is exceedingly tedious; and in a mine at work, where many galleries already existing are to be traversed, much greater rapidity is desirable. In such a case the shaft is sunk in several pieces (see diagram below), or, in other words, the sinking is commenced at the same time in different levels; and no small skill is required to lay out the work, so that the different portions of the shaft thus formed may exactly fit when they are joined together. An exceedingly small error of measurement, in any one of these various and dark subterranean passages, would, in fact, be sufficient to throw the whole into confusion; but such an accident rarely happens, although works of the kind are common in the Cornish mines.”[^[21]] As an illustration of the immense quantity of water in the mines, we may add—and this is almost as startling as any romantic fiction—that the various branches of the principal level in Cornwall, called “the Great Adit, which receives the waters of the numerous mines in Gwennap, and near Redruth, measure on the whole about 26,000 fathoms, or nearly thirty miles in length; one branch only, at Cardrew mine, extends for nearly five miles and a half, and penetrates ground seventy fathoms beneath the surface. The water flows into a valley communicating with a small inlet of the sea, and is discharged about forty feet above high-water mark.”[^[22]] In this method about forty millions of tons of water are raised by steam-power out of the mines in Cornwall.

EAST WHEAL CROFLY COPPER MINE, CORNWALL.

Here, then, we have seen two of the economic uses of geology in connexion with granite alone; and as we think of these mineral treasures, requiring only the labour and skill of man to bring them out for his service and for the civilization of the world, our boast is in our native land, which, though insular and small, combines within itself everything needful to develop its three sources of national wealth—mining, manufactures, and agriculture—to their highest point. Our boast is not the warrior’s boast, which Shakspeare puts into the mouth of one of his heroes—that this our isle is

“That pale, that white-faced shore,

Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides,

And coops from other lands her islanders”—

but rather that, without impropriety or irreverence, the words of Holy Writ may as legitimately be applied to Great Britain as to Palestine. It is a land wherein “thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.[^[23]] When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which He hath given thee.” (Deut. viii. 9, 10.)

But before we bring this chapter on granite and its kindred rocks to a close, we must glance at one more purpose served by this Plutonic rock. Here is a teacup, and here is a piece of granite: the one comes from Cornwall, the other is made in Staffordshire or Worcestershire. What relation have they to each other? If it were not thought infra dig., we should say the granite is the parent of the teacup. In Cornwall, especially in the neighbourhood of St. Austel, the writer has lately visited what are called the China clay works. “The granite is here in a state of partial decomposition. In some localities, this growan” (Cornish for disintegrated granite) “is tolerably firm, when it resembles the Chinese Kaolin, and, quarried under the name of China stone, is extensively employed in the potteries. This is ready for the market when cut into blocks of a size convenient for transport; but the softer material, which is dug out of pits, and called China clay, or porcelain earth, requires a more elaborate preparation for the purpose of separating the quartz, schorl, or mica from the finer particles of the decomposed feldspar. This clay is dug up in stopes or layers, which resemble a flight of irregular stairs. A heap of it is then placed upon an inclined platform, under a small fall of water, and repeatedly stirred with a piggle and shovel, by which means the whole is gradually carried down by the water in a state of suspension. The heavy and useless parts collect in a trench below the platform; while the China clay, carried forward through a series of catch-pits or tanks, in which the grosser particles are deposited, is ultimately accumulated in larger pits, called ponds, from which the clear supernatant water is from time to time withdrawn. As soon as these ponds are filled with clay, they are drained, and the porcelain earth is removed to pans, in which it remains undisturbed until sufficiently consolidated to be cut into oblong masses. These are carried to a roofed building, through which the air can freely pass, and dried completely for the market. When dry they are scraped perfectly clean, packed in casks, and carried to one of the adjacent ports, to be shipped for the potteries.”[^[24]] As furnishing some idea of the extent to which this business is carried on, it may be added that 37,000 tons of this China clay are annually shipped from the south-west of England to the potteries, the value of which is upwards of £50,000, while the number of working men and women thus employed is beyond calculation. This is one of the practical results of geology. This is one of the things which geology, once a neglected and unpopular science, has done for our comfort and welfare. “A hundred years ago, it does not seem that any part of this China clay was made use of, or that this important produce was then of any value whatever.”[^[25]]

We bring this chapter to a close. Granite and its kindred rocks should stand associated with an actual history and poetry, not inferior to the history and poetry of man’s own handiwork; and we believe geology, so often regarded with dread by the uninitiated, will soon be considered worthy a patient and painstaking investigation. Remembering that geology is still an incomplete science, and that we have much yet to learn concerning the laws of organic and inorganic matter, we should be modest in the maintenance of any theory, while thankful for the acquisition of any fact. “We have yet to learn whether man’s past duration upon the earth—whether even that which is still destined to him—is such, as to allow him to philosophise with success on such matters; whether man, placed for a few centuries on the earth as in a schoolroom, has time to strip the wall of its coating and count its stones, before his Parent removes him to some other destination.”[^[26]]

CHAPTER IV.
THE PALÆOZOIC PERIOD.

“In His hand are the deep places of the earth.”—David.

Trench, in his charming little book on the “Study of Words,” says of words that they are “fossil poetry.” He adds, “Just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or finely vertebrated lizard, such as now it may be, have been extinct for many thousands of years, are permanently bound up in the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would otherwise have been theirs; so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished—these, which would so easily have perished too, are preserved and made safe for ever.”

Geology is the fossil poetry of the earth; such a poetry as those can never dream of who in a pebble see a pebble and nothing more. But to those who walk through this great and beautiful world intent upon finding material for thought and reflection, there is no “picking up a pebble by the wayside without finding all nature in connexion with it;” and the most retired student, in search not simply of the picturesque or of the beautiful, but of anything and everything that can minister to his profounder worship of Him to whom belongeth both “the deep places of the earth and the strength of the hills,” may say of his solitary rambles:—

“There rolls the deep where grew the tree;—

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.”[^[27]]

We now enter upon the ancient life, or Palæozoic period of the earth’s history, and proceed to examine the oldest forms of life, or the most ancient organic remains found in the crust of the earth. As we do not aim to teach geology in this small work, but simply to place the chief geological facts in such a light as to impart a taste for the science, the reader will not expect any minute details, which are more likely to perplex than to assist the beginner. Let the reader dismiss from his mind all that he has tried to remember about Upper and Lower Silurian rocks, and the Upper and Lower Ludlow rocks, the Caradoc sandstone and the Llandilo flags, and so on; let us simply say that one part of the crust of the earth, supposed to be between 50,000 and 60,000 feet in thickness,[^[28]] is called the Silurian system, and constitutes a large and interesting part of the Palæozoic period. The term Silurian was given to this part of the earth’s crust in consequence of these rocks being found chiefly in Wales, Devon, and Cornwall—parts of England once inhabited by the Silures, who under Caractacus made so noble a stand against the Romans.

In coming for the first time into contact with the organic remains of pre-Adamite creations, it may be well to entreat the student to mark, as he goes on, the very different and characteristic fossils of the several formations through which we propose to travel. There will be little or no difficulty in doing this, and its mastery will be of invaluable service in our after researches. There is and there can be no royal road to any kind of learning; all, therefore, that we propose to do is to take a few of the big stones, boulders, &c., that have needlessly been allowed to make the road rougher than necessary, out of the way, that thus our companion traveller on this geologic route may feel that every step of ground walked over is a real and solid acquisition. In marking the characteristic fossils of each formation, let us suggest, in passing, the vast amount of pleasure there is in going to a friend’s house, and looking at the minerals or organic remains that may be in the cabinet or on the mantel-shelf, and being able to take them up one by one, and to say this is from the Silurian; that is from the Carboniferous; this is from the Cretaceous, and that from the Wealden formations, and so on. Why, it gives a magical feeling of delightful interest to every object we see, and will always make a person a welcome visitor with friends with whom, instead of talking scandal, he can talk geology. Not long since the writer had a very pleasing illustration of this. He had been lecturing on geology in a small agricultural village; there was a good sprinkling of smock-frocks among the hearers, and he said at the close of one of the lectures, “Now, very likely most of you have got some stones, as you call them, at home on the chimneypiece; perhaps you don’t know their names, or what they were before they became stones; well, bring them next week, and we will do our best to name them for you!” Next week, after the lecture, up came one, and then another, and then a third, and so on; and diving their hands down into the old orthodox agricultural pocket, brought out a variety of specimens, some of them very good indeed, which had been “picked up” by them in the course of their labour, and which, supposed to be “rather kūrŭss,” had been carefully conveyed home. When these matters were given a “local habitation and a name,” the delight of many was most gratifying.

Now, all this is only just the application of M. Cousin’s words in relation to physical geography: “Give me the map of a country, its configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and all its physical geography; give me its natural productions, its flora and fauna, and I pledge myself to tell you à priori what the inhabitants of that country will be, and what place that country will take in history, not accidentally, but necessarily; not at a particular epoch, but at all periods of time; in a word, the thought that country is formed to represent.”

These remarks furnish us with a clue. Each formation has its own peculiar and characteristic fossils, and these fossils are arranged with as much care, and preserved as uninjured, as if they had been arranged for a first-class museum. But before proceeding on this fossiliferous tour, we may anticipate a question that may possibly be asked on the threshold of our inquiries, and into which we propose going fully in the sequel of this volume. It may be asked, “Were not these fossils placed in the rocks by the Deluge?” To this, at present, we answer, that so partial and limited was the character of the Deluge, being confined to just so much of the earth as was inhabited by man, and so brief was its duration, compared with the vast geological epochs we shall have to consider, that we do not believe we have one single fossil that can be referred to the Noachian deluge; and before we close, we trust it will have been made evident to every careful reader that fossils, as records of Noah’s flood, are an impossibility; and that the vast antiquity of the globe, taken into connexion with the prevalence of death on a most extensive scale, ages and ages previous to the creation of man, can alone account for our innumerable treasures of the “deep places of the earth.”

1

The characteristic fossils of the Silurian system are entirely unique. The trilobite may fairly be regarded as the prominent one; besides which there are orthoceratites, and graptolites, some members of the crinoidean family, with different kinds of corallines, and some other names to be rendered familiar only by future further study. We shall confine ourselves to those that our own recent researches have made us familiar with. First, here is the trilobite. We need not perplex our readers by any of the numerous subdivisions of this remarkable animal’s nomenclature; that would defeat the purpose of this book. Any work on geology will do this.[^[29]] Here are three trilobites: one (1) by itself; another, (2) imperfect in its bed or matrix, and a third (3) rolled up.

This most remarkable crustacean possessed the power of rolling itself up like the wood-louse or the hedgehog; and, reasoning by analogy, we suppose this to have been its defence against its numerous enemies. It is a very abundant fossil, found all over Europe, in some parts of America, at the Cape of Good Hope, but never in more recent strata than the Silurian. The hinder part of the body is covered with a crescent-like shield, composed of segments like the joints of a lobster’s tail; and two furrows divide it into three lobes, whence its name.[^[30]] Most remarkable are the eyes of this animal, and it is the only specimen in the vestiges of ancient creations in which the eye, that most delicate organization, is preserved; and if, as we believe, this little creature was living and swimming about, now and then fighting with some greater Cephalopodous mollusk, millions and millions of years ago, then in this fact we have the real fossil poetry of science, the romance of an ancient world which geology reveals to our delighted and astonished minds. From Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise we give a drawing of the eyes of the trilobite; and in Buckland’s words we add: “This point deserves peculiar consideration, as it affords the most ancient, and almost the only example yet found in the fossil world, of the preservation of parts so delicate as the visual organs of animals that ceased to live many thousands, and perhaps millions of years ago. We must regard these organs with feelings of no ordinary kind, when we recollect we have before us the identical instruments of vision through which the light of heaven was admitted to the sensorium of some of the first created inhabitants of our planet.”[^[31]]

But these are not the only fossils, or organic remains, to be found in the clay, slates, &c., of the Silurian system. Passing by those we have briefly indicated above, there are others of a highly interesting character, concerning some of which we proceed to give a brief history. Being in Cornwall a short time since, we made a visit to Polperro, a romantic but out-of-the-way town on the south-west coast, for the purpose of procuring some remains of fossil fish considered characteristic of the Silurian system of Murchison, and which have been recently discovered by Mr. Couch, an eminent local naturalist, in the cliffs east and west of that town. We did not see Mr. Couch, but found our way to a coast-guardsman, also a naturalist, whom we found to be a most skilful bird and fish stuffer, and a ranger for objects of natural history among the surrounding clay-slates and other rocks. William Loughrin’s collection of Cornish curiosities will well repay any traveller going out of the way twenty or thirty miles, and they will find in him a fine specimen of an intelligent and noble class of men. Below we give some specimens from the Polperro slate. No. 1 might be taken for impressions of sea-weed, so remarkably does it resemble the sea-weed thrown up on our beaches; but it is generally conceded that this is merely a crystallization of oxydized matter, such as may often be found in connexion with manganese.

No. 1.

No. 2 is the Bellerophon,[^[32]] a shell which we shall afterwards find in the mountain limestone, but which is rare in connexion with the Silurian rocks.

No. 2. Bellerophon, a shell which seems to have been abundant.

No. 3. Remains of Vegetable Texture.

No. 3 we know not how to describe. We are not certain what organic remains these are; so far as we have been able to examine them, they appear to us the remains of succulent vegetables, (?) probably the thick, soft stems of sea-weed, that may once have reposed in quiescence on the mud of which these slates are composed, and afterwards have been crushed by the superposition of mud and shale, until in the course of ages, by upheaval and depression, they have become a second time visitants of our atmosphere, and now expose themselves to our study and speculations.

No. 3. (Portion magnified two natural sizes.)

No. 4. Coralline. (Natural size.)

Here is one more form of life of this ancient period; it is evidently a coralline, which we also procured at Polperro.

Let us suppose our readers to have made themselves familiar with these organic remains, simply as characteristic and illustrative of this formation; they will easily find their way into other traces and remnants of ancient life in the Silurian epoch. How absurd must seem the development hypothesis to those who rightly ponder these old, old vestiges! It seems to us a very idle idea to suppose that a trilobite could develop itself into a bird, or a monkey, or by any series of happy accidents, could become a man;[^[33]] yet such has been the theory of those who overlook what some writer on geology, whose name we forget, has expressed strongly in these words: “There is no fact which has been demonstrated more completely to the satisfaction of every man of real science, than that there is no known power in nature capable of creating a new species of animal, or of transmuting one species into another.”

We close this chapter on the Silurian system in the eloquent words of Professor Sedgwick: “The elevation of the faunas of successive periods was not made by transmutation, but by creative additions, and it is by watching these additions that we get some insight into nature’s true historical progress. Judging by our evidence—and what else have we to judge by?—there was a time when Cephalopods were the highest type of animal life. They were then the Primates of this world, and, corresponding to their office and position, some of them were of noble structure and gigantic size. But these creatures were degraded from their rank at the head of Nature, and Fishes next took the lead; and they did not rise up in nature in some degenerate form, as if they were only the transmuted progeny of the Cephalopods, but they started into life in the very highest ichthyic type ever reached.

“Following our history chronologically, Reptiles next took the lead, and, with some evanescent exceptions, they flourished during the countless ages of the secondary period as the lords and despots of the world: and they had an organic perfection corresponding to their exalted rank in Nature’s kingdom; for their highest orders were not merely great in strength and stature, but were anatomically raised far above any forms of the Reptile class now living in the earth. This class, however, was in its turn to lose its rank. Mammals were added next (near the commencement of the tertiary period), and seem to have been added suddenly. Some of the early extinct forms of this class, which we now know only by ransacking the ancient catacombs of Nature, were powerful and gigantic, and we believe well fitted for the place they filled. But they in turn were to be degraded from their place in Nature, and she became what she now is by the addition of man. By this last addition she became more exalted than before. Man stands by himself, the despotic lord of the living world; not so great in organic strength as many of the despots that went before him in Nature’s chronicle, but raised far above them all by a higher development of brain, by a framework that fits him for the operations of mechanical skill, by superadded reason, by a social instinct of combinations, by a prescience that leads him to act prospectively, by a conscience that makes him amenable to law, by conceptions that transcend the narrow limits of his vision, by hopes that have no full fruition here, by an inborn capacity of rising from individual facts to the apprehension of general laws, by a conception of a cause for all the phenomena of sense, and lastly, by a consequent belief in the God of nature:—such is the history of nature.”[^[34]]

LANDS END, CORNWALL.

CHAPTER V.
THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

“The fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.”—Job.

Lord Bacon remarks, “Some men think that the gratification of curiosity is the end of knowledge, some the love of fame, some the pleasure of dispute, and some the necessity of supporting themselves by knowledge; but the real use of all knowledge is this, that we should dedicate that reason which was given us by God to the use and advantage of man.” The historian of the old red sandstone, Hugh Miller, to whose researches not only we, but such men as Murchison, Lyell, Ansted, Agassiz and others, are so exclusively indebted, is a philosopher in this last category. He does not hesitate to tell us, how, as a Cromarty quarryman “twenty years ago,” he commenced a “life of labour and restraint,” a “slim, loose-jointed boy, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake;”[^[35]] and how, as a quarryman, he ever kept his eyes open, to observe the results of every blow of the hammer, stroke of the pick, or blast of the powder; and finding himself in the midst of new and undreamt-of relics of an old creation, preserved in “tables of stone,” he adds his testimony to that of the great father of inductive philosophy, “that it cannot be too extensively known, that nature is vast and knowledge limited, and that no individual, however humble in place or acquirement, need despair of adding to the general fund.”[^[36]]

We here enter upon a marvellous field of discovery. Hitherto the forms of life we have met with have all been invertebrate. The trilobite, something between a crab and a beetle, once revelling, in untold myriads, probably on the land as well as in the water, and of which two hundred and fifty species have been brought to light, is the highest type of life with which our researches have made us familiar. We are now to begin the study of fossil fish, and to their discovery, strange forms, and characters, this chapter will be specially devoted. It was once a generally received opinion among even the most learned geologists, that the “old red sandstone,” or the “Devonian system,” was particularly barren of fossils, but the labours (literally such, “mente, manu, malleoque”[^[37]]) of Hugh Miller have proved the contrary. “The fossils,” he says, “are remarkably numerous, and in a state of high preservation. I have a hundred solid proofs by which to establish the proof of my assertion, within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the lower old red sandstone; and certainty a stranger assemblage of forms have rarely been grouped together; creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even their class; boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder; fish plated over like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish less equivocal in their form, but with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; creatures bristling over with thorns, others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned, the tail in every instance among the less equivocal shapes, formed not equally as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side, the column sending out its diminished vertebræ to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity—of a period whose fashions have passed away.”[^[38]]

The old red sandstone formation prevails in the north of Scotland, Herefordshire, north of Devonshire, part of Cornwall, and in Worcestershire and Shropshire. Our attention will be principally confined to Cromarty, whose romantic bay and high hills have long arrested the admiring gaze of the traveller. This was the scene of Hugh Miller’s labours and discoveries; this the great library in which he read the history of pre-Adamite ichthyolites[^[39]] exposed not only to the light of day, but for the first time to the inspection of human eyes, by the sweat-of-brow toil of one of Scotland’s noble sons. Before we get into the hard names that must be connected with this chapter, let us hear Mr. Miller describe this library of God’s books that was so long his wonder and his study in Cromartyshire. “The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir-wood on the other. Not the united labours of a thousand men for a thousand years could have furnished a better section of the geology of this district than this range of cliffs; it may be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth’s crust. We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy precipices of gneiss, its huge masses of horneblend; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little known, but very interesting fossils of the old red sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shell and lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,—basalts, ironstones, hyperstenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as best I might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentiments were the patient gatherings of years.”[^[40]]

Now with regard to the hard names to which we have just made allusion—names that, apart from their etymology, which is nothing more than “sending vagrant words back to their parish,” are enough to startle any one; names such as heterocercal, homocercal, cephalaspis, pterichthys, coccosteus, osteolepis, &c. &c.—why, they will all presently become plain, and, we hope, familiar to our readers. “They are,” says Hugh Miller, “like all names in science, unfamiliar in their aspect to mere English readers, just because they are names not for England alone, but for England and the world. I am assured, however, that they are all composed of very good Greek, and picturesquely descriptive of some peculiarity in the fossils they designate.”[^[41]]

The rest of this chapter will be occupied with an account of the four most remarkable and characteristic fishes of this formation, to understand which a few preliminary remarks are necessary. Cuvier divided all fish into two groups, the bony and the cartilaginous; and these two groups he subdivided into two divisions, characterised by differences in their fins, or organs of locomotion, one of which he called Acanthopterygian,[^[42]] (thorny-finned,) and the other, Malacopterygian,[^[43]] (or soft-finned.) This concise arrangement did not, however, meet all the wants of the fish-students, and it was often practically difficult to know under which class to arrange particular specimens. More recently M. Agassiz has arranged fish, not according to their fins, but according to their scales; and simple as this classification may seem, it is one of the greatest triumphs of genius in modern times, inasmuch as all fishes extinct and existing, that have inhabited or are inhabiting the “waters under the earth,” may be grouped easily under the following four divisions:—

1. Ganoid Scale; as bony pike.[^[44]]

2. Placoid Scale.[^[45]]

3. Ctenoid Scale; as sole or perch.[^[46]]

4. Cycloid Scale; as herring.[^[47]]

One more preliminary remark, and we will proceed to look at the four fishes already alluded to. Neither the teacher nor the student of any science can skip definitions, axioms, postulates, and so on; they must just be mastered, and their mastery is a real pleasure. In addition to a marked difference in the fins, a difference was observed also in the tails of fossil (extinct) and living pieces of fish. This difference between the tails of fish has been happily described in two words, heterocercal and homocercal, of which the figures below will give a better idea than a lengthened description.

1. Heterocercal.

2. Homocercal.

3. Homocercal.

The heterocercal fish, it will be seen, are unequally lobed, that is, the spinal vertebræ are prolonged into the upper lobe of the tail, as seen in the shark, and of which our own dog-fish is an example; while the homocercal fish are equally lobed, and the spine does not extend into either.

The fossil fish of the old red sandstone belong almost, if not entirely, to the classes of fish that have ganoid or placoid scales, and heterocercal tails; and of these fish we will now say a few words of the four most remarkable specimens of the one thousand and upwards fossil species that have been discovered, and which can only be known familiarly by accomplished geologists in the ichthyolite department.

1. Here is a drawing of the Cephalaspis,[^[48]] or buckler-headed fish. What an extraordinary looking creature this is! Like the crescent shape of a saddler’s knife without the handle—broad and flat, with points on each side running down, ever fixed in warlike attitude against its enemies—it reminds one of an extinct trilobite, and of a living sole or ray, at the same time; and one can easily fancy how hard it must have been for its ancient foes to swallow down so singular and so knife-like looking a creature. This is one of the curious organisms of old life discovered in Cromarty, Herefordshire, and in Russia, the original of which, restored in the drawing, seldom if ever exceeded seven inches.

Let us look now at another curiosity from the same quarter.

2. Here is a drawing of the Coccosteus,[^[49]] or berry-boned fish. This creature is equally singular with his long extinct neighbour. Hugh Miller’s description is the best, and as he was its discoverer, let us give it.

“The figure of the Coccosteus I would compare to a boy’s kite; there is a rounded head, a triangular body, a long tail attached to the apex of the triangle, and arms thin and rounded where they attach to the body, and spreading out towards their termination, like the ancient one-sided shovel which we see sculptured on old tombstones, or the rudder of an ancient galley. A ring of plates, like the ring-stones of an arch, runs along what we may call the hoop of the kite. The form of the key-stone plate is perfect; the shapes of the others are elegantly varied, as if for ornament; and what would be otherwise the opening of the arch is filled up with one large plate of an outline singularly elegant.”[^[50]]

3. Above is the Pterichthys,[^[51]] or winged fish. We have here a fish more strikingly different to any existing species than either of the other two just passed under review. “Imagine,” says Miller, “the figure of a man rudely drawn in black on a grey ground; the head cut off by the shoulders; the arms spread at full, as in the attitude of swimming; the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from the chest downwards; one of the legs cut away at the hip-joint; the other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directly in the centre of the figure, which it seems to support. Such, at the first glance, is the appearance of the fossil.”[^[52]]

We will now turn to the fourth and last of the singular fishes of this formation.

4. The Osteolepis,[^[53]] or bony scaled fish. Here we have in the old red sandstone the first perfect specimen of a fish with pectoral, abdominal, and caudal fins, ending as the others do in the heterocercal tail. The vertebral column seems to have run on to well-nigh the extremity of the caudal fin, which we find developed chiefly on the under side. The tail was a one-sided tail. Take into account with these peculiarities such as the naked skull, jaws, and operculum,[^[54]] the naked and thickly set rays, and the unequally lobed condition of tail, a body covered with scales that glitter like sheets of mica, and assume, according to their position, the parallelogramical, rhomboidal, angular, or polygonal form, a lateral line raised, not depressed, a raised bar on the inner or bony side of the scales, which, like the doubled up end of a tile, seems to have served the purpose of fastening them in their places, a general clustering of alternate fins towards the tail—and the tout ensemble must surely impart to the reader the idea of a very singular little fish.[^[55]]

Most hasty and superficial is this glance through the wonders of the old red sandstone. On the economic uses of this formation, as tile-stones and paving-stones, we need not dwell; apart from this, these singular inhabitants of the seas of past ages, the mud of which, elevated and hardened, has become solid rock, tell us stories of that long since ancient time to which no poetry could do justice. Carried away from the present into those remote eras, our minds revel in the realization of scenery and inhabitants, of which now we possess only the fossil pictures. At the British Museum, we gaze with feelings approaching to repulsion on the stiff and unnatural forms of Egyptian mummies, but with what feelings of profound wonder do we look on these small fishes, so numerous that the relics of them, found in the Orkneys, may be carried away by cartloads! No number of creations can exhaust God, for in Him all fulness dwelleth. The God in whom we now live, and move, and have our being, is the same God who gave to these pre-Adamite fish their marvellous structures, minutely but fearfully and wonderfully made, and who, when their joy of life and functions of life had ceased, consigned them to a calm and peaceful grave. He is the same God who now upholds all things by the word of his power, and whom we desire to honour by the attentive and reverent perusal of his manifold works. We are tautologists; we say and do the same thing over and over again. God never repeats himself: each successive creation—and how many, extending through countless ages, does geology disclose!—only reveals some new aspect of wisdom, love, and beneficence. To the mind that cannot repose in God, we say, Study God, in his works and in his word; yea, come back to this remote sandstone era and ask of the “fishes, and they shall declare unto thee” the might and majesty, the skill and contrivance of the Almighty; and though you and I were not there, nor had Adam yet trod this blessed earth,—

“Think not, though men were none,

That heaven could want spectators, God want praise;

Millions of spiritual creatures walked the earth,

And these with ceaseless praise His works beheld.”

CHAPTER VI.
THE CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM.

“As for the earth, out of it cometh bread, and under it is turned up as it were fire.”—Job.

Suppose this lump of coal could speak, what would it say? Would it not say something like this: “To get me up out of the earth involves dirt, danger, slush, and much tallow-candle; but now you have me, let me tell you my story, for though black I am comely, and but for me—but I anticipate. Now and then I make a dust in your libraries, and inadvertently shoot out sparks and firestones, but nevertheless I am of more use to man than the old granite or the proudest Parian marble; you may get a long way in philosophy, but you will never get beyond coal. I am the real Koh-i-noor of the British empire; and though I can’t, like my namesake, put on a white dress, I am nevertheless worth the soiling of your whitest gloves. Chemistry makes no discoveries without me: I light the fire of the laboratory, and furnish man with the means of every crucial test. Civilization wants me every day on land and sea, and though in one sense my labours end in smoke, in another they end in commerce, progress, national brotherhood, and interchanging productions of every clime. The poor student needs me, for I light his lamp, warm his feet, and cook his food while he is doing sweat-of-brain work for others. And best of all, the poor man is a rich man when he has me; he knows that next of kin to good food is good fuel, and man by my help is making such progress, that the day will come when every man will sit by his own blazing fire, instead of seeking joy elsewhere amidst false and pernicious excitements.”

Something like this our friend Coal would be sure to say; and that Coal may not complain of any aloofness on our parts, let us proceed to an examination of the carboniferous system.

“’Tis very pregnant,

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take it,

Because we see it; but what we do not see,

We tread upon, and never think of it.”

Measure for Measure.

The carboniferous system is not all coal; underlying, and often overlying, the coal measures, for the most part, is the mountain limestone, a formation pre-eminently rich in marine fossils. During the tremendous convulsions experienced by the earth immediately after the deposition of the old red sandstone, a vast sea of lime, thick, muddy, and hot, seems to have been poured out over a large portion of the British islands and elsewhere. This flow of liquid lime covered and encased many then existing animals, and we now find it full of fossils of the crinoidean family, a few molluscs, and traces of fish. We shall not, however, stay to examine these now, as we shall meet with them again in the Oolite; our attention will be limited to that part of the carboniferous system which includes only the coal measures, properly so called.

Coal is a vegetable that, by chemical change and by mechanical pressure, has become a bituminous mineral; and this will render it needful to say a word or two on the ancient vegetable kingdom. The vast quantities[^[56]] of remains of leaves, ferns, and stems of trees, found in the coal measures, are not in themselves evidence sufficient of the vegetable origin of coal; we arrive at that conclusion in consequence of the researches of modern philosophers, who having applied the powers of the microscope to the internal structure of coal, have discovered the cellular and reticular construction of vegetable life beautifully preserved, and thus previous convictions have become certainties. The examination of the ancient vegetable kingdom is, however, attended with much difficulty, in consequence of the total destruction in most cases of the stems and trunks of the plants, and the entire absence, in consequence of pressure, of all fructification on the fronds of the ferns. If we take an existing species of fern, say the rare and delicate “maiden-hair fern,”[^[57]] one of the smallest and most elegant ferns of England, we find the fructification very distinct on the under side, and the different methods in which this fructification is arranged is now the principal guide in the classification of ferns. But if we take a fossil fern, say the pecopteris, found in the coal measures, we shall see that there has been so much dislocation and crushing, that all appearance of seed-vessels has disappeared. The following sketch will explain this.

EXTINCT FERN, AND MAIDEN-HAIR FERN.

“Nothing,” says Professor Ansted, “however, is more certain than that all coal was once vegetable; for in most cases the woody structure may be detected under the microscope, and this, if not in the coal in its ordinary state, at least in the burnt ashes which remain after it has been exposed to the action of heat, and has lost its bituminous and semi-crystalline character. This has been too well and too frequently proved by actual experiment to require more than the mere statement of the fact.” And here let us say a few words, which to a few perhaps may have the charm of novelty, about the economic history of coal; for as Cowper says that the first curse, “labour,” has, by God’s blessing on it, been “softened into mercy,” so do we add also, in his words, heartily subscribing to their truth,—

“Thus studied, used, and consecrated thus,

On earth what is, seems formed indeed for us;

Not as the plaything of a froward child,

Fretful unless diverted and beguiled;

But as scale, by which the soul ascends

From mighty means to more important ends;

Securely, though by steps but rarely trod,

Mounts from inferior beings up to God;

And sees, by no fallacious light or dim,

Earth made for man, and man himself for Him.”

How long coal has been known and used, we cannot certainly tell, but a writer in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia states that the first mention of coal is in the pages of one Theophrastus, who was, it seems, a pupil of Aristotle. He says, “Those fossil substances that are called coals,” (Greek, ἄνθραξ) “and are broken for use, are earthy; they kindle, however, and burn like wood coals; they are found in Liguria and in the way to Olympias over the mountains, and are used by the smiths.” Cæsar, although he speaks of the metals of the British isles, does not once mention its coal; but it seems more than likely that it was both known and used by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. Horsley, in his “Britannia Romana,” says of Benwell, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne, “There was a coalry not far from this place, which is judged by those who are best skilled in such affairs to have been wrought by the Romans; and, in digging up the foundations of one of the Roman walled cities, coal cinders very large were dug up, which glowed in the fire like other coal cinders, and were not to be known from them when taken up.”

During the time of the Saxons, we find ourselves on less doubtful ground. In a grant made to the monks of Peterborough Abbey for one night’s annual entertainment, those good old souls had, we find, “ten vessels of Welsh ale, two vessels of common ale, sixty cartloads of wood, and twelve cartloads of fossil coal,” (carbonum fossilium.)

The Danes had so much fighting on hand, that they troubled themselves neither with coal nor civilization; and we know little of our English diamond until we come to Henry the Third’s reign, when, in 1239, a charter was granted to the inhabitants of Newcastle-on-Tyne to dig coals, and we find the coal called for the first time “carbo maris,” or sea-coal, a term retained through all the succeeding centuries. About this time chimneys came into fashion. As long as people burnt wood they scarcely needed chimneys, but coal introduced chimneys, to say nothing of steamboats and railroads. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who at that time used to reside alternately at Croydon and at Lambeth, had by royal permission thirty cartloads of “sea-borne coal” annually delivered at his archiepiscopal palace, because, says the historian, “for his own private use in his own chamber he now had the convenience of chimneys.”

The smoke nuisance of that day deserves a passing notice. Smoke was then with many a grand luxury. Old Hollingshed says, “Now we have many chimneys, yet our tenderlings do complain of rheums, and catarrhs, and poses. Once we had nought but rere-doses,[^[58]] and our heads did never ake. For the smoke of those days was a good hardening for the house, and a far better medicine to keep the good man and his family from the quack or the pose, with which then very few were acquainted. There are old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain, who have noted how the multitude of chimneys do increase, whereas in their young days, there was not above two or three, if so many, in some uplandish towns of the realm, and peradventure in the manor places of some great lords; but each one made his fire against a rere-dose in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat. But when our houses were built of willow, then we had oaken men; but now that our houses are made of oak, our men are not only become willow, but a great many altogether men of straw, which is a sore alteration.”

Leaving this digression, let us try and get a bird’s-eye view of the coal-fields of the British Isles. If we commence in Devonshire, we find there the Devonian culms, or Bovey Tracey coal, lying near the surface of the ground, and of little except local use. Crossing over the Bristol Channel, we come into Pembrokeshire, to the Welsh basin, remarkable because thence we mostly get our anthracite coal. Thence we pass on to the Derbyshire coal-fields, that go with little interruption into Scotland, averaging 200 miles in length, and about 40 in width,—once mighty tropical swamps, jungles, and forests, now become chief minerals of commerce. Included in this last immense field is the great Newcastle coal district, the most celebrated of any, supplying almost all the south of England, and nearly all London, with their best coals; and the Scotch carboniferous system, celebrated for its numerous fossils, and for its general base of old red sandstone. In addition to which there is the Irish carboniferous system, occupying as much as 1,000 square miles, but of an inferior quality, and not likely to be of any great economical importance.

In the words of Professor Ansted, we add: “This account of the coal-beds gives a very imperfect notion of the quantity of vegetable matter required to form them; and, on the other hand, the rate of increase of vegetables, and the quantity annually brought down by some great rivers both of the eastern and western continents, is beyond all measure greater than is the case in our drier and colder climates. Certain kinds of trees which contributed largely to the formation of the coal, seem to have been almost entirely succulent,[^[59]] and capable of being squeezed into a small compass during partial decomposition. This squeezing process must have been conducted on a grand scale, and each bed in succession was probably soon covered up by muddy and sandy accumulations, now alternating with the coal in the form of shale and gritstone. Sometimes the trunks of trees caught in the mud would be retained in a slanting or nearly vertical position, while the sands were accumulating around them; sometimes the whole would be quietly buried, and soon cease to exhibit any external marks of vegetable origin.”[^[60]]

There are various kinds of coal on which we may bestow a few words. There is anthracite, or non-bituminous coal, and which, therefore, burns without flame or smoke, and is extensively used in malting; and sea-coal, which is highly bituminous, and which gives forth so much flame and smoke, that in the good old times of 1306, Parliament forbad its use in London by fine and by demolition of all furnaces in which it was burnt, because “this coal did corrupt the air with its great smoke and stink;” and cannel-coal, the etymology of which, they say, is firm the word candle, because in many parts of Lancashire the poor use it in place of oil or tallow for lights; and jet, sometimes called black amber, which in France employs about 1,200 men in one district, in making earrings, rosaries, and other ornaments; and last of all, there is wood passing into coal called lignite, found only in the Devonshire culms.

Having thus glanced at the natural history and varieties of coal, we may here try and realize the flora of the carboniferous era. An examination of the fossils of this period enables us to come to undoubted conclusions concerning the trees and plants of that era, so that it is no mere dream to look upon a picture like the following, and see in it a landscape of the coal-forming time of the British islands.

FLORA OF THE COAL MEASURES RESTORED.

The sun then poured down his golden beams of heat and light, and a tropical climate prevailed in our now cold and humid England. The mountain tops were gilded with his rays; a vast ocean studded with islands, and these crowned with gigantic palms and ferns, then covered our northern hemisphere. In that ocean but few fish were to be found, though many rare molluscous animals swam to and fro, enjoying their brief term of life, and discharging all their appropriate functions. Mountain streams discharged their muddy waters into this ocean, leaving along their margin course broken trees, vegetables, grasses and ferns. The giant Lepidodendron looked like a monarch of the ancient world, while around him smaller ferns, vying with each other in beauty and grace, grew, “first the blade” and then the ripened frond, until, in obedience to the great law of organic life, they died and decayed, and became material for the coming man’s future use. But amidst all this prodigal luxuriousness of the vegetable world, there appears to have been neither bird nor beast to break the monotony of the scene; all was silent as the grave—rank, moist verdure below; magnificent ferns and palms above, and the stillness of death on every side.[^[61]]

Let us, however, glance at the principal ferns, whose fossil remains we have often found at the mouth of many a coalpit thrown out among the waste. The uncouth names given to them, uncouth only in appearance, must not deter the reader from his acquaintance with their peculiarities; for are not the names of botanical science almost, if not quite, as repellent at first? This star-shaped beauty, (1) the asterophyllite, (from aster, a star, and phyllon, a leaf,) was a common one; this (2) is the sphenopteris (from sphēn, a wedge, and pteron, a wing), so named from a fancied resemblance of the petals of the frond to a wedge; the next (3) is the pecopteris (from pekos, a comb, and pteron, a wing), from a resemblance of the frond to the teeth of a comb; the next (4) is the odontopteris (from odous, a tooth, and pteron, a wing), and in this the frond is something like the jaws of a shark bound together by a central stem, from which they diverge; and the last (5), our favourite, is the neuropteris (from neuros, a nerve, and pteron, a wing), on account of the exquisite beauty with which the fibres, like nerves, distribute themselves.

“Besides the ferns, then growing to a great size, there were other plants whose modern representatives are uniformly small; but as the resemblance in this case is simply one of general form, and the great majority of other trees seem to possess no living type to which they can be referred, it is by no means impossible that these also may be completely lost. One example of them is seen in a plant, fragments of which are extremely common in the coal measures, and which has been called calamite.[^[62]] The remains of calamites consist of jointed fragments, which were originally cylindrical, but are now almost always crushed and flattened. They resemble very closely in general appearance the common jointed reed, growing in marshes, and called equisetum, or mare’s tail; but instead of being confined to a small size, they would seem to have formed trees, having a stem more than a foot in diameter, and jointed branches and leaves of similar gigantic proportions. They were evidently soft and succulent, and very easily crushed. They seem to have grown in great multitudes near the place where the coal is now accumulated; and though often broken, they seldom bear marks of having being transported from a distance.”[^[63]] The fossils of the carboniferous system here figured we found not long since in the neighbourhood of Stockport.

CALAMITES.

CALAMITE.

STIGMARIA FICOIDES.

This chapter on the carboniferous system must not be further lengthened. We do not aspire to teach the science of geology; we aim only to impart such a taste for it as shall lead the reader to consult our master works on this subject, and if we succeed in this humble but useful aim, our purpose will be fully answered. Only in reference to the economic uses of coal, we will quote the following, copied, we believe, from the “Athenæum” some time since, but unfortunately copied without reference to its original; a lesson for common-place-book keepers. The writer in speaking of coal-gas says: “The consumption of gas is enormous. The following statistics give us an insight into the extent which this branch of industry has attained. In England 6,000,000 tons of coals are annually employed for the manufacture of gas, and from 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 pounds sterling expended in its production. In London alone 500,000 tons of coals are annually used, producing 4,500,000,000 cubic feet of gas, and 500,000 chaldrons of coke; of the latter, 125,000 chaldrons are consumed in manufacturing the gas, and the remainder sold for fuel. Upwards of half-a-million houses in London burn gas, and the length of the main arteries for conveying it is 1,600 miles. The capital employed in the metropolis is 4,000,000l. The manufacture of coal-gas for the purpose of illumination affords one of the most striking instances of the triumphs of science when enlisted in the divine cause of civilization. Looking at it as a whole, and regarding the ingenuity evinced in the construction of apparatus, the chemical skill and beauty displayed in the process, and the very valuable purposes to which it is applied, it forms one of the most beautiful, curious, and useful of our manufactures; and probably there is no subject of a manufacturing character in the present day which more engages public attention, coal-gas having now become not a mere luxury, or even convenience, but an absolute necessary. In the words of my late colleague and friend, Dr. Hofmann, ‘The extent to which the use of gas has affected the arts and manufactures in this country, can only be conceived by those who are aware of its innumerable applications in the double capacity of giving light and heat. To our experimental chemists the benefits afforded by gas cannot be overrated, more especially in England, where the price of spirits of wine is so exorbitant. But for the use of gas in the laboratory, the progress of chemistry in this country must have been greatly retarded.’

“In speaking of the general influence of the manufacture of coal-gas, it is impossible to leave unnoticed the number of hands daily engaged in raising whole strata of coal, in loading and navigating the fleets employed in conveying it, not only to the different parts of this kingdom, but to foreign countries, which consume a larger quantity of English coal for the production than is generally known. The extension of the gas enterprise produced a sensible effect on the ironworks, by the vast number of retorts, the stupendous gas-holders, and endless pipes required for generating, storing, and conveying it.

“Several other branches of trade were also forced into increased activity, and even new trades sprung up in consequence of the extended use of gas. The substances produced in the purification of gas naturally attracted the attention of the gas manufacturer; and chemistry soon pointed out valuable purposes to which they might be applied. The oily matter, which separates as a secondary product in the distillation of coal, yielded, when purified in its more volatile portion, the most convenient solvent for caoutchouc; another part of it was found to be an efficient preservative of timber, and the pitchy residue formed the chief ingredient of an excellent substitute for the flag stones of our pavements; while the ammoniacal liquors were found useful in improving the fertility of land. Thus, after the lapse of countless ages, was the nitrogen of petrified fern forests resuscitated in the ammoniacal liquors of the gas-works, to vegetate once more and increase the produce of our corn fields.”

SIR HUMPHREY DAVY’S LAMP, AND MINER AT WORK.

“All nature feels the secret power,

And through eternal change obeys

Up from the deepest region creeps

The trace of life of former days.”

Faust.

CHAPTER VII.
SECONDARY FORMATIONS.
No. 1. The New Red Sandstone.

“There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen; the lions’ whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.”—Job.

We now take our leave of the Palæozoic period, and enter upon the investigation of other and more recent geological epochs in the history of the crust of our planet. This division is known by the names Secondary or Mesozoic,[^[64]] and is inclusive of the New Red Sandstone, Oolitic, Wealden, and Cretaceous groups. If, in our previous survey, we have had our minds filled with wonder as we looked at the disinterred relics of past creations, and have gazed at these fossil forms of ancient life with almost a loving interest in their still remaining beauty; so, as we now study higher types of life, and behold how “other wonders rise, and seize the soul the prisoner of amaze,” we shall find reason upon reason for the penetration of our minds with the profoundest adoration of Deity. No man turning up a tumulus, and there finding coins, weapons, beads, vases, or other such historical relics, would venture to say such things were created there; on the contrary, he would acknowledge that they were Roman, and that he had come to that conclusion by perceiving their resemblance to other and similar ancient Roman relics, discovered where there could be no doubt of their origin and history. Or if a traveller were to visit the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and there find buried beneath the overwhelming torrent of once burning lava, all possible kinds of human memorials, not only in human works, but also in the skeleton remains of human beings, would he not come to the conclusion that these were indubitable evidences of those cities having once been inhabited by man, and that these skeletons were once covered with warm flesh, and that they had lived, and moved, and had their being, even as we do now, amidst the activities and enjoyments of actual life? We apply this to geology. There are persons who never judge by evidence, (though what else have we to judge by?) but rashly jump to conclusions about geological facts, that have not a particle of common sense to sustain them. They never think that every rounded pebble they meet with has been so rounded by the action of water; they imagine sand to have been created as sand, instead of taking the geologist’s proof, that all sand has been produced by the action of moving water on solid rock. They believe that fossils were created, and that God put encrinital remains, and dead ammonites, and bones of saurians, and teeth and bones of great mammals, in the earth, just as we find them in the cliffs and caves of this and every country; and they imagine that thus to account for the wonders of creation redounds to the glory of that God whom thus they ignorantly worship. Even our great publishing society in Paternoster Row,[^[65]] that has published about everything in natural history but geology, has acknowledged to me that it declines to undertake a work on this science, because of the theological difficulties connected with the subject. Why, what is this but the very way to breed infidelity? The man who studies nature and who studies his Bible, is not ashamed to say he believes them both; though two books, they are both given by inspiration of God. Man may be a liar, but neither nature nor the Bible can lie; and while one tells us the history of man, the other reveals to us the history of the creation, and succession of those beings which preceded the advent of man.

We now come to the New Red Sandstone, which must occupy our attention both on account of the unique fossil remains found in it, and also on account of its economic use and value in commerce. Few formations, small as it is, possess so many points of interest to the beginner as the new red sandstone; for, lying just above the carboniferous, and between it and the oolitic group, we find in it certain curiosities of very olden time, that are full of marvellous power to fill us with amaze. Every one remembers Robinson Crusoe’s surprise at finding “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand,” and how he “stood like one thunder-struck, or as if he had seen an apparition;” and then how he “went again to see if it might not be his fancy, but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot;” and then how, after “innumerable fluttering thoughts, and out of himself,” he went home terrified to his fortification.

Equally surprising are the discoveries made in the old red sandstone. Large slabs of this rock have been discovered in England, in Scotland, and in the United States, on which are left, as Robinson left the impression of his foot, the undisturbed footmarks of pre-Adamite animals; the ebb and flow of the tide of those distant ages; the ripple-mark showing the direction of the wind; and casts of the rainprints made by showers, long long ages ere man had taken possession of the “deep places of the earth.” “Romantic nonsense!” says a grave friend; “let us go to something practical, instead of losing ourselves in such idle speculations.” Now, you are just the person whose ear we want to catch; and to you we say, just listen to the evidence of these assertions. “The casts of rainprints below project from the under side of two layers; the one a sandy shale, and the other a sandstone presenting a warty or a blistered surface, and affording evidence of cracks formed by the shrinkage of subjacent clay on which rain had fallen. The great humidity of the climate of the coal period had been previously inferred from the nature of its vegetation, and the continuity of its forests for hundreds of miles; but it is satisfactory to have at length obtained such positive proofs of showers of rain, the drops of which resembled in their average size those which now fall from the clouds. From such data we may presume that the atmosphere of the carboniferous period corresponded in density with that now investing the globe and that different currents of air varied then as now in temperature, so as to give rise, by their mixture, to the condensation of aqueous vapour.”[^[66]]

CASTS OF RAIN-PRINTS.

Again, let us hear the words of Professor Ansted. “It may appear at first sight that nothing can be more fleeting, or less likely to be handed down to future ages, among the fossils of a bed of sandstone, than the casts of the impressions of the footsteps of an animal, which by chance may have walked over that bed when it existed in the condition of loose sand forming a seashore. A little consideration, however, will show that it is in fact a very possible occurrence, as, if the wet sand should be immediately covered up with a thin coating of marl, and another layer of sand be superimposed, such an impression will be permanently preserved. In after ages, also, when the soft sands have become sandstones, and are elevated above their former level, the stones split asunder wherever a layer of different material occurs; and thus it happens that the casts of the footsteps may be preserved and exhibited, although all other traces of the former existence of the animal have been lost.”[^[67]]

FOOTPRINTS OF A TRYDACTYLE BIRD, AND IMPRESSION OF RAIN.
(Nat. size.)

If we go to the British Museum, on the north wall of room No. 1. we shall find slabs of sandstone containing footprints of animals, apparently bipeds and quadrupeds, of which we find the following notice in the catalogue of the Museum; and when this description is compared with the three drawings that follow, we make no doubt of carrying the conviction of the reader along with our own, as to the origin of these extraordinary ichnites,[^[68]] as such petrified prints are termed:—“The slabs of sandstone on the north wall of this room, with the supposed tracks of an animal called Cheirotherium, are that on the left from the quarries of Hildburghausen in Saxony, and that in the centre from those of Horton Hill, near Liverpool, (the latter presented by J. Tomkinson, Esq.) On the right hand are placed slabs from the same new red sandstone formation, with equally enigmatical imprests of various dimensions, called Ornithichnites,[^[69]] being very like footmarks of birds; they occur in the sandstone beds near Greenfield, Massachusetts, at a cataract in the Connecticut River known by the name of Turner’s Falls.”

FOOTPRINTS OF BIPEDS (BIRDS?) PROM TURNER’S FALLS.
(Size of slab, 8 ft. by 6.)

The lines in this drawing are merely to indicate the direction, the line of progress, of these bipeds, and the reader by following the lines will find the illustration all the more interesting.

But the most remarkable footprints preserved on slabs of sandstone are those of a quadruped, whose hinder feet were much larger than his fore feet. Some of our marsupial[^[70]] quadrupeds, such as the opossum and kangaroo, and many species of batrachian[^[71]] reptiles, are distinguished by the same peculiarity. Below is a copy of this slab, which is in the window recess of the same room of the British Museum.

The animal that left these impressions on the soft sandy shore, that are now converted into hard stone, was originally named the Cheirotherium,[^[72]] and, indeed, this name is still retained by many writers, the hand-like footprints being quite a sufficient reason for so appropriate a name; but latterly the teeth of a fossil animal, supposed to be the same as the Cheirotherium, having been examined, and disclosing a peculiarly labyrinthine character, the animal has been called Labyrinthodon.[^[73]] Professor Owen, the great comparative anatomist of geology, has fairly established the real character of this animal. He says it is a huge frog, a gigantic batrachian, with hinder feet at least twelve inches in length, combining a crocodilian with a frog-like structure; and although the actual shape and proportions of such an animal must remain greatly an enigma, it is one of the wondrous marvels of geology to pause over these extinct huge creatures, and mark in them the exhaustless resources of creative power.

“So reads he nature, whom the lamp of truth

Illuminates,—thy lamp, mysterious Word!

Which whoso sees, no longer wanders lost,

With intellects bemazed in endless doubt,

But runs the road of wisdom. Thou hast built

Worlds that never had been, hadst thou in strength

Been less, or less benevolent than strong.”

In Professor Ansted’s remarkable prose poem on geology, called, “The Ancient World,” we have the following picture of the new red sandstone period, which we quote for its vivid but faithful colouring:—“We may imagine a wide, low, sandy track by the sea-side; the hills and cliffs of limestone, which still rise boldly on the shores of the Avon, and in Derbyshire and Yorkshire, having then been recently elevated, and forming a fringe to the coast line. In some places, where footprints are found in successive beds and at different levels, local elevation was probably going on, and the line of coast was occasionally shifting. The sandy fiats thus laid bare, and not reached by the ordinary level of high water, were of course traversed by the ancient animals of that period; but only a few faint records of them have been handed down for our observation. Amongst these, however, we are able to enumerate turtles and tortoises, a little lizard having a bird-like beak, and probably a bird’s foot,—birds themselves, some larger than an ostrich, others as small as our smaller waders. In some parts of the world there were also large reptiles with powerful tusks, not surpassed in the amount of their departure from the ordinary structure of reptiles by any known aberrant forms of that strange and varied tribe.

“Amongst the most striking of these objects, at least on our own shores, would be the numerous and gigantic Labyrinthodons. We may imagine one of these animals, as large as a rhinoceros, pacing leisurely over the sands, leaving deep imprints of its heavy, elephantine hind foot, strangely contrasting with the diminutive step of its short fore extremities. Another, a small variety, provided like the kangaroo, not only with powerful hind legs, but also with a strong tail,[^[74]] also leaves its impress on the sand, although itself, perhaps, soon fell a victim to the voracity of its larger congener. These and others of their kind, passing over the sands, and marking there the form of their expanded feet, marched onwards in their course, fulfilled their part in nature, and then disappeared for ever from the earth, leaving, in some cases, no fragment of bone, and no other indication of their shape and size than this obscure intimation of their existence.

“It is strange that in a thin bed of fine clay, occurring between two masses of sandstone, we should thus have convincing evidence preserved concerning some of the earth’s inhabitants at this early period. The ripple mark, the worm track, the scratching of the small crab on the sand, and even the impression of rain drops, so distinct as to indicate the direction of the wind at the time of the shower,—these and the footprints of the bird and the reptile are all stereotyped, and offer an evidence which no argument can gainsay, no prejudice resist, concerning the natural history of a very ancient period of the earth’s history. But the waves that made that ripple mark have long since ceased to wash those shores; for ages has the surface then exposed been concealed under great thicknesses of strata; the worm and the crab have left no solid fragment to speak to their form or structure; the bird has left no bone that has yet been discovered; and the fragments of the reptile are small, imperfect, and extremely rare. Still, enough is known to determine the fact, and that fact is the more interesting and valuable from the very circumstances under which it is presented.”[^[75]]

But reminding ourselves of one part of the title of our book, which professes not only to describe the crust of the earth, but also to point out its uses, we must add a few words on the economic value of this small but interesting formation. In this same new red sandstone are found the salt mines of Cheshire, and the brine pits of Worcestershire, which supply all the rock and table salt consumed in England, besides vast quantities for exportation. The rock salt of Cheshire was first discovered near Northwich, while searching for coal; but the largest mine, called the Wilton Mine, is at Nantwich, and still yields about 60,000 tons of salt annually. The salt is generally found from twenty-eight to forty-eight yards beneath the surface, in thick strata varying from fifteen to thirty-five yards in thickness. Besides these beds of salt, there are brine springs from twenty to forty yards in depth. Our common table salt is almost exclusively derived from these springs, which is produced by evaporating the water, and allowing the salt to settle at the bottom of the pans, where, after being washed, it is placed in moulds like the China clay, and comes to our grocers’ shops in the blocks we frequently see. “So far as observation has yet gone, the English supply is practically inexhaustible; no limit is known to the extent of the beds or the springs; and it ought to be regarded as one of the blessings which we owe to the mineral wealth of our country, that the beautiful table salt of England may be obtained at such an extremely low price as that now charged for it.”[^[76]]

To this formation, with its fossil footprints, we owe doubtless the fine fancy of Longfellow, in one of his sweet minor poems; and we shall bring this chapter to a close by quoting the last three verses of this lyric. If we can fulfil such a mission, we had better be frail and erring men than huge Labyrinthodons:—

“Lives of great men all remind us,

We can make our lives sublime,

And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

“Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwreck’d brother,