with long fingers to catch its prey, and was guarded from assault by an elaborately worked suit of armour, consisting of at least twenty-six thousand pieces so constructed and fitted together as to be proof at every point and yet allow of the freest movementa feat which the most expert Milan armourers only executed in a very imperfect way. The famous beads of St. Cuthbert are made of the joints of these old stone lilies. Star-fishes and sea-urchins were now seen in these old Silurian seas, their strange radiate forms changing continually in pattern down to our day; they too, like ours, were given to committing suicide by explosion. Shell-fish of the oyster tribe soon appeared, and the crab had its representativenot in an animal of the commonly accepted form but in a creature called a trilobite, very much like an immense woodlouse being sometimes eighteen inches long. Along with remains of the trilobites have been found fragments of a lobster that must have been quite seven feet long.* Some of these trilobites were marked strangely enough with spots as if they had died of smallpox, others resembled tropical bugs, their tails being furnished with cruel-looking spines; they were more akin to our king-crab than most of his edible brethren; they flourished in great strength till the close of the coal epoch when they pass away, none of them being found in the upper beds of the coal. The beautifully jointed shells of this animal exhibit the most perfect contrivances ever yet seen for securing freedom of movement and protection at the same time. These animals like the molluscs could The Great Stone Book. see, indeed the eye was so complex as to resemble that of some modern insects, and there are sound reasons for thinking they may also have been able to hear, so that already the grand work of variety of form and function, developed to such an extent in later ages, had begun. Fishes some writers say have no sense of taste, as if everything that sank into the waters to become their food must necessarily turn cold, watery, and insipid I doubt the conclusion. The power of hearing has been denied them on equally weak grounds; Miller however gives strong reasons for believing that some of the most ancient fishes had, to judge from the comparative development of the organs, full power of smell, sound, and sight, so that they were as well off s those of later times. As yet we have no sign of the enormous bulk which distinguished the reptiles and mammals of a later period. Beauty there was however of its kind both of form and hue, for the stone lilies were daintily sculptured with geometrical patterns resembling the style of the Early English. One variety has been compared to a baby's rattle, which it certainly resembled, its arms instead of expanding being netted together. The second day was no longer marked by the palpable darkness which until then had shrouded everything; still the atmosphere was heavy and torpid, like that supposed to hang round Mercury and form the dark bands on the surface of Jupiter; it was so laden with carbon too that it must have proved fatal to any warm-blooded living being with sensitive lungs. There was no land on which anything could grow, for it had first of all to be irrigated by the muddy rivers, or be built up bed after bed at the bottom of the lakes; but it was nigh at hand, and as the faint light sinks into evening it rises from the waters, bearing with it the earliest traces of land plants. By some writers the Malvern Hills have been considered the first English land that rose from the bosom of our primæval ocean. Indeed not merely these but the east flank of the Wrekin are far far older than the Alps or Himalayas, and certainly they were well adapted to defy the tooth of time, the storm, and earthquake; Malvern indeed is of such adamantine strength that the engineers had hard work to get through it. Scotland too claims a proud pre-eminence in point of antiquity; as Miller says, it can call the towering Mont Blanc a mere upstart, and Dawalaghiri, more than five miles high and rising thousands of feet above the clouds, a heady fellow of yesterday. Even some more modern stones are of far greater age than much we are apt to ascribe great antiquity to; thus, our Portland stone is immeasurably older than the stone of the Pyramids. Agassiz however places America in advance of all. In one of his articles in the "Atlantic," entitled "America the Old World," he says "here was the first dry land lifted out of the waters; here was the first shore that was washed by the ocean that enveloped all the world beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Novia Scotia to the far west." THE THIRD GREAT DAY.-Again the curtain rises with returning light, and reveals the second great epoch in the history of life-the laying down of the Old Red Sandstone, now made a household word by the genius of Miller, and bearing in its colour proof of the first appearance of that mighty metal iron, which was in time to bring everything under the rule of man. The forming of this great geological production, in every country the home of the earliest land plants, appears to have been attended with an amount of violence unusual even in those stormy times. All the pomp and horror that the volcano and earthquake could lend, preluded the appearance of land destined to be tenanted by a more developed race of beings. And when it is recollected that a mountain* has been raised one thousand six hundred feet in the course of a single night, and the whole top of another mountain for six hundred feet down has been blown off at once by an eruption, as the funnel of a steamer is sometimes torn away in the explosion of a boiler; that there is a volcano at Piraunea eight miles in circumference at its crater, and that Cotopaxi glows at its lofty summit like molten glass and can project a mass a hundred cubic yards in volume between eight and nine miles; when we read how Etna has discharged a hundred and forty million cubic yards of lava at one eruption, and Skaptar Jokul has poured over the devoted plains of Iceland, at one and the same time, two streams of lava one seven and the other twelve miles wide, both some ninety feet deep and forty or fifty miles long; when we remember how Vesuvius† * Jorullo. + In 1822, Vesuvius launched a block of lava several tons in weight for three miles, it fell in the garden of Prince Ottajano. has buried whole towns, and a convulsion of Papandayang has engulfed forty villages at once, we may form some faint idea of the scene that must have presented itself when these forces were raging with primæval strength and unchecked fury,-when far and wide the land looked like the Iron Country on a winter's night, and every volcano showed in the gloom like a great forge chimney belching out torrents of melted stone and slag, while the scarred and shattered earth rocked beneath the resistless throes of the earthquake. Hugh Miller dwells with his wonted eloquence on these strange scenes of destruction. After describing a platform near Cromarty, where as if suddenly overtaken by overwhelming destruction the ichthyolites lie in myriads grouped in every posture of terror and agony, he says, "we see the spiked wings of the pterichthys elevated to the full, as if they had been erected in the fatal moment of anger and alarm; and the bodies of the cheirolepis and cheiracanthus bent head to tail in the stiff posture into which they had curled when the last pang was over." In another ichthyolite bed he found "the thorny acanthidians twisted half round as if in the agony of dissolution, and the pterichthyses still extending their spear-like arms in the attitude of defence," the catastrophe having clearly overtaken them quite unawares. "In the Old Red Sandstone of Caithness," he says, "there are many such platforms, story rises over story and the floor of each bears its closely written record of disasters and sudden extinction. Pompeii, in this northern locality, lies over Herculaneum, and Angelo over both. We cease to *The largest volcano in the island of Java. |