The Testimony of the Rocks Part 18

These are rather more sessile than the young cones of the larch; but the aspect of the whole is that of a larch twig in early summer, when the minute and tender cones, possessed of all the beauty of flowers, first appear along its sides.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 132.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 133.

ZAMIA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 134.

ZAMIA.]

Among conifers of the Pine and Araucarian type we mark the first appearance in this system, in at least Scotland, of the genus Thuja. One of the Helmsdale plants of this genus closely resembles the common Arbor Vitae (_Thuja occidentalis_) of our gardens and shrubberies. It exhibits the same numerous slim, thick-cl.u.s.tered branchlets, covered over by the same minute, sessile, scale-like leaves; and so entirely reminds one of the recent Thuja, that it seems difficult to conceive of it as the member of a flora so ancient as that of the Oolite. But not a few of the Oolitic plants in Scotland bear this modern aspect. The great development of its Cycadaceae,--an order unknown in our Coal Measures,--also forms a prominent feature of the Oolitic flora. One of the first known genera of this curious order,--the genus Pterophyllum,--appears in the Trias. It distinctively marks the commencement of the Secondary flora, and intimates that the once great Palaeozoic flora, after gradually waning throughout the Permian ages, and becoming extinct at their close, had been succeeded by a vegetation altogether new. At least one of the Helmsdale forms of this family is identical with a Yorkshire species already named and figured,--_Zamia pectinata_: a well marked Zamia which occurs in the Lias of Eathie appears to be new. Its pinnate leaves were furnished with a strong woody midrib, so well preserved in the rock, that it yields its internal structure to the microscope. The ribbon-like pinnae or leaflets were rectilinear, retaining their full breadth until they united to the stem at right angles, but set somewhat awry; and, like several of the recent Zamiae, they were striped longitudinally with cord-like lines. (Fig.

133.) Even the mode of decay of this Zamia, as shown by the abrupt termination of its leaflets, exactly resembled that of its existing congeners. (Fig. 134.) The withered points of the pinnae of recent Zamiae drop off as if clipped across with a pair of scissors; and in fossil fronds of this Zamia of the Lias we find exactly the same clipped-like appearance. (Fig. 135.) Another Scotch Zamia (Fig. 136), which occurs in the Lower Oolite of Helmsdale, resembles the Eathie one in the breadth of its leaflets, but they are not wholly so rectilinear, diminishing slightly towards their base of attachment; they are ranged, too, along the stem or midrib, not at a right angle, but at an acute one; the line of attachment is not set awry, but on the general plane of the leaf; and the midrib itself is considerably less ma.s.sive and round. A third species from the same locality bears a general resemblance to the latter; but the leaflets are narrower at the base, and, as the print indicates (Fig. 136), so differently attached to the stem, that from the pressure in the rock most of them have become detached; while yet a fourth species (Fig. 137), very closely resembles a Zamia of the Scarborough Oolite,--_Z. lanceolata_. The leaflets, however, contract much more suddenly from their greatest breadth than those of _lanceolata_, into a pseudo-footstalk; and the contraction takes place not almost equally on both sides, as in that species, but almost exclusively on the upper side. And so, provisionally at least, this Helmsdale Zamia may be regarded as specifically new.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 135.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 136.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 137.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 138.

CONE.]

With the leaves of the Eathie Zamia, we find, in this northern outlier of the Lias, cones of a peculiar form, which, like the leaves themselves, are still unfigured and undescribed, and some of which could scarce have belonged to any coniferous tree. In one of these (Fig. 138), the ligneous bracts or scales, narrow and long, and gradually tapering till they a.s.sume nearly the awl-shaped form, cl.u.s.ter out thick from the base and middle portions of the cone, and, like the involucral appendages of the hazel-nut, or the sepals of the yet unfolded rose-bud, sweep gracefully upwards to the top, where they present at their margins minute denticulations. In another species the bracts are broader, thinner, and more leaf-like: they rise, too, more from the base of the cone, and less from its middle portions; so that the whole must have resembled an enormous bud, with strong woody scales, some of which extended from base to apex. The first described of these two species seems to have been more decidedly a _cone_ than the other; but it is probable that they were both connecting links between such leathern seed-bearing flowers as we find developed in _Cycas revoluta_, and such seed-bearing cones as we find exemplified in _Zamia pungens_. The bud-like cone, however, does not seem to have been that of a Cycadaceous plant, as it occupied evidently not a terminal position on the plant that bore it, like the cones of Zamia or the flowers of Cycas, but a lateral one, like the lateral flowers of some of the Cactus tribe.

Another cla.s.s of vegetable forms, of occasional occurrence in the Helmsdale beds, seems intermediate between the Cycadaceae and the ferns: at least, so near is the approach to the ordinary fern outline, while retaining the stiff ligneous character of Zamia, that it is scarce less difficult to determine to which of the two orders of plants such organisms belonged, than to decide whether some of the slim graceful sprigs of foliage that occur in the rocks beside them belonged to the conifers or the club mosses. And I am informed by Sir Charles Lyell, that (as some of the existing conifers bear a foliage scarce distinguishable from that of Lycopodiaceae), so a recently discovered Zamia is furnished with fronds that scarce differ from those of a fern.

Even _Zamia pectinata_ may, as Sternberg remarks, have been a fern.

Lindley and Hutton place it merely provisionally among the Cycadaceae, in deference to the judgment of Adolphe Brogniart, and point out its resemblance to _Polypodium pectinatum_; and a small Helmsdale frond which I have placed beside it bears the impress of a character scarce less equivocal. The flora of the Oolite was peculiarly a flora of intermediate forms.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 139.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 140.]

We recognize another characteristic of our Oolitic flora in its simple-leaved fronds, in some of the species not a little resembling those of the recent Scolopendrium, or Hart's-Tongue fern,--a form regarded by Adolphe Brogniart as peculiarly characteristic of his third period of vegetation. These simple ferns are, in the Helmsdale deposits, of three distinct types. There is first a lanceolate leaf, from two and a half to three inches in length, of not unfrequent occurrence, which may have formed, however, only one of the four leaflets, united by their pseudo-footstalks, which compose the frond of Glossopteris,--a distinctive Oolitic genus. There is next a simple ovate lanceolate leaf, from four to five and a half inches in length, which in form and venation, and all save its _thrice_ greater size, not a little resembles the leaflets of a Coal Measure neuropteris,--_N. ac.u.minata_. And, in the third place, there are the simple leaves that in general outline resemble, as I have said, the fronds of the recent Hart's-Tongue fern (_Scolopendrium vulgare_), except that their base is lanceolate, not cordate. Of these last there are two kinds in the beds, representative of two several species, or, as their difference in general aspect and detail is very great, mayhap two several genera. The smaller of the two has a slender midrib, depressed on its upper side, and flanked on each side by a row of minute, slightly elongated protuberances, but elevated on the under side, and flanked by rows of small but well marked grooves, that curve outwards to the edges of the leaf. The larger resemble a Taeniopteris of the English and Continental Oolites, save that its midrib is more ma.s.sive, its venation less at right angles with the stem, its base more elongated, and its size much greater. Some of the Helmsdale specimens are of gigantic proportions. From, however, a description and figure of a plant of evidently the same genus,--a Taeniopteris of the Virginian Oolite, given by Professor W.B. Rogers of the United States,--I find that some of the American fronds are larger still. My largest leaf from Helmsdale must have been nearly five inches in breadth; and if its proportions were those of some of the smaller ones of apparently the same species from the same locality, it must have measured about thirty inches in length. But fragments of American leaves have been found more than six inches in breadth, and whose length cannot have fallen short of forty inches. The Taeniopteris, as its name bears, is regarded as a fern. From, however, the leathern-like thickness of some of the Sutherland specimens,--from the great ma.s.siveness of their midrib,--from the rectilinear simplicity of their fibres,--and, withal, from, in some instances, their great size,--I am much disposed to believe that in our Scotch, mayhap also in the American species, it may have been the frond of some simple-leaved Cycas or Zamia. But the point is one which it must be left for the future satisfactorily to settle; though provisionally I may be permitted to regard these leaves as belonging to some Cycadaceous plant, whose fronds, in their venation and form, resembled the simple fronds of Scolopendrium, just as the leaves of some of its congeners resembled the fronds of the pinnate ferns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 141.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 142.]

I have already referred to the close resemblance which certain Cycadaceous genera bear to certain of the fern family. In at least two species of Pterophyllum,--_P. comptum_ and _P. minus_,--the divisions of the leaflets seem little else than accidental rents in a simple frond; in _P. Nelsoni_ they are apparently _nothing_ more; and similar divisions, evidently, however, the effect of accident, and less rounded at their extremities than in at least _P. comptum_, we find exhibited by some of the Helmsdale specimens of Taeniopteris (See Fig. 142, p. 488.) But whatever the nature of these simple fronds, they seem to impart much of its peculiar character, all the world over, to the flora of the Oolitic ages.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 143.

PECOPTERIS OBTUSIFOLIA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 144.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 145.

PACHYPTERIS.]

The compound ferns of the formation are numerous, and at least proportionally a considerable part of them seem identical in species with those of the Oolite of England. (See Fig. 143.) Among these there occur _Pecopteris Whitbiensis_, _Pecopteris obtusifolia_, _Pecopteris insignis_,--all well marked English species; with several others. It has, besides, its apparent ferns, that seem to be new--(Fig. 144)--that are at least not figured in any of the fossil floras to which I have access,--(Fig. 145),--such as a well defined Pachypteris, with leaflets broader and rounder than the typical _P. lanceolata_, and a much stouter midrib; a minute Sphenopteris too, and what seems to be a Phlebopteris, somewhat resembling _P. propinqua_, but greatly more ma.s.sive in its general proportions. The equisetacea we find represented in the Brora deposits by _Equisetum columnare_,--a plant the broken remains of which occur in great abundance, and which, as was remarked by our President many years ago, in his paper on the Sutherlandshire Oolite, must have entered largely into the composition of the bed of lignite known as the Brora Coal. We find a.s.sociated with it what seems to be the last of the Calamites,--_Calamites arenaceus_,--a name, however, which seems to have been bestowed both on this Oolitic plant and a resembling Carboniferous species. The deposit has also its Lycopodites, though, from their resemblance in foliage to the conifers, there exists that difficulty in drawing the line between them to which I have already adverted. One of these, however, so exactly resembles a lycopodite of both the Virginian and Yorkshire Oolite,--_L. uncifolius_,--that I cannot avoid regarding it as specifically identical; and it seems more than doubtful whether the stem which I have placed among the conifers is not a lycopodite also. It exhibits not only the general outline of the true club moss, but, like the fossil club mosses too, it wants that degree of ligniferous body in the rock which the coniferous fossils almost always possess. Yet another of the organisms of the deposit seems to have been either a lycopodite or a fern. Its leaflets are exceedingly minute, and set alternately on a stem slender as a hair,--circ.u.mstances in which it resembles some of the tiny lycopodites of the tropics, such as _Lycopodium apodium_. I must mention, however, that the larger plant of the same beds which I have placed beside it, and which resembles it so closely that my engraver finds it difficult to indicate any other difference between them than that of size, appears to be a true fern, not a lycopodium. To yet another vegetable organism of the system,--an organism which must be regarded, if I do not mistake its character, as at once very interesting and extraordinary, occurring as it does so low in the scale, and bearing an antiquity so high,--I shall advert, after a preliminary remark on a general characteristic of the flora to which it belongs, but to which it seems to furnish a striking exception.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 146.

PHLEBOPTERIS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 147.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 148.]

From the disappearance of many of those anomalous types of the Coal Measures which so puzzle the botanist, and the extensive introduction of types that still exist, we can better conceive of the general features and relations of the flora of the Oolite than of those of the earlier floras. And yet the general result at which we arrive may be found not without its bearing on the older vegetations also. Throughout almost all the families of this Oolitic flora, there seems to have run a curious bond of relationship, which, like those ties which bound together some of the old clans of our country, united them, high and low, into one great sept, and conferred upon them a certain wonderful unity of character and appearance. Let us a.s.sume the ferns as our central group.

Though less abundant than in the earlier creation of the Carboniferous system, they seem to have occupied, judging from their remains, very considerable s.p.a.ce in the Oolitic vegetation; and with the ferns there were a.s.sociated in great abundance the two prevailing families of the Pterides,--Equiseta and Lycopodia,--plants which, in most of our modern treatises on the ferns proper, take their place as the fern allies. (See Fig. 148.) Let us place these along two of the sides of a pentagon,--the Lycopodia on the right side of the ferns, the Equiseta on the left; further, let us occupy the two remaining sides of the figure by the Coniferae and the Cycadaceae,--placing the Coniferae on the side next the Lycopodia, and the Cycadaceae, as the last added keystone of the erection, between these and the Equiseta. And now, let us consider how very curious the links are which give a wonderful unity to the whole. We still find great difficulty in distinguishing between the foliage of some of even the existing club mosses and the conifers; and the ancient Lepidodendra are very generally recognized as of a type intermediate between the two. Similar intermediate types, exemplified by extinct families, united the conifers and the ferns. The a.n.a.logy of _Kirchneria_ with the _Thinnfeldia_, says Dr. Braun, is very remarkable, notwithstanding that the former is a fern, and that the latter is ranked among conifers. The points of resemblance borne by the conifers to the huge Equiseta of the Oolitic period seem to have been equally striking.

The pores which traverse longitudinally the channelled grooves by which the stems of our recent Equiseta are so delicately fluted, are said considerably more to resemble the discs of pines and araucarians than ordinary stomata. Mr. Francis does not hesitate to say, in his work on British Ferns, that the relation of this special family to the Coniferae is so strong, both in external and internal structure, that it is not without some hesitation he places them among the fern allies; and it has been ascertained by Mr. Dawes, in his researches regarding the calamite, that in its internal structure this apparent representative of Equiseta in the earlier ages of the world united "a network of quadrangular tissue similar to that of Coniferae to other quadrangular cells arranged in perpendicular series," like the cells of plants of a humbler order.

The relations of the Cycadacean order to ferns on the one hand, and to the Coniferae on the other, are equally well marked. As in the ferns, the venation of its fronds is circinate, or scroll-like,--they have in several respects a resembling structure,--in at least one recent species they have a nearly identical form; and fronds of this fern-like type seem to have been comparatively common during the times of the Oolite.

On the other hand, the Cycadaceae manifest close relations to the conifers. Both have their seeds originally naked; both are cone-bearing; both possess discs on the sides of their cellules; and in both, in the transverse section, these cellules are subhexagonal, and radiate from a centre. Such were the very curious relations that united into one great sept the prevailing members of the Oolitic flora; and similar bonds of connection seem to have existed in the floras of the still earlier ages.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 149.

IMBRICATED STEM.

(_Helmsdale._)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 150.

(_Helmsdale._)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 151.]

In the Oolite of Scotland I have, however, at length found trace of a vegetable organism that _seems_ to have lain, if I may so express myself, outside the pentagon, and was not a member of any of the great families which it comprised. (See Fig. 151.) I succeeded about four years ago in disinterring from the limestone of Helmsdale what _appears_ to be a true dicotyledonous leaf, with the fragment of another leaf, which I at first supposed might have belonged to a plant of the same great cla.s.s, but which I now find might have been a portion of a fern. When _Phlebopteris Phillipsii_ was first detected in the Oolite of Yorkshire, Lindley and Hatton, regarding it as dicotyledonous, originated their term Dictyophillum as a general one for all such leaves. But it has since been a.s.signed to a greatly lower order,--the ferns; and Sir Charles Lyell has kindly shown me that an exotic fern of the present day exhibits exactly such a reticulated style of venation as my Helmsdale fragment. (See Fig. 152, p. 497.) The other leaf, however, though also fragmentary, and but indifferently preserved, seems to be decidedly marked by the dicotyledonous character; and so I continue to regard it, provisionally at least, as one of the first precursors in Scotland of our great forest trees, and of so many of our flowering and fruit-bearing plants, and as apparently occupying the same relative place in advance of its contemporaries as that occupied by the conifer of the Old Red Sandstone in advance of the ferns and Lycopodaceae with which I found it a.s.sociated. In the arrangement of its larger veins the better preserved Oolitic leaf somewhat resembles that of the buckthorn; but its state of keeping is such that it has failed to leave its exterior outline in the stone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 152.]

One or two general remarks, in conclusion, on the Oolite flora of Scotland may be permitted me by the a.s.sociation. In its aspect as a whole it greatly resembles the Oolite flora of Virginia, though separated in s.p.a.ce from the locality in which the latter occurs by a distance of nearly four thousand miles. There are several species of plants common to both, such as _Equisetum columnare_, _Calamites arenaceus_, _Pecopteris Whitbiensis_, _Lycopodites uncifolius_, and apparently _Taeniopteris magnifolia_; both, too, manifest the great abundance in which they were developed of old by the beds of coal into which their remains have been converted. The coal of the Virginia Oolite has been profitably wrought for many years: it is stated by Sir Charles Lyell, who carefully examined the deposit, and has given as the results of his observation in his second series of Travels in the United States, that the annual quant.i.ty taken from the Oolitic pits by Philadelphia alone amounted to ten thousand tons; and though, on the other hand, the Sutherlandshire deposit has never been profitably wrought, it has been at least wrought more extensively than any other in the British Oolite.

The seam of Brora, varying from three feet three to three feet eight inches in thickness, furnished, says Sir Roderick Murchison, between the years 1814 and 1826, no less than seventy thousand tons of coal. Such is its extent, too, that nearly thirty miles from the pit's mouth (in Ross-shire under the Northern Sutor) I have found it still existing, though in diminished proportions, as a decided coal seam, which it must have taken no small amount of vegetable matter to form. And almost on the other side of the world, nearly five thousand miles from the Sutherland beds, and more than eight thousand miles from the Carolina ones, the same Oolitic flora again appears, a.s.sociated with beds of coal. At Nagpur in Central India the Oolitic Sandstones abound in simple fronded ferns, such us Taeniopteris and Glossopteris, and has its Zamites, its coniferous leaves, and its equisetaceae.

Compared with existing floras, that of our Scottish Oolite seems to have most nearly resembled the flora of New Zealand,--a flora remarkable for the great abundance of its ferns, and its vast forests of coniferous trees, that retain at all seasons their coverings of acicular spiky leaves. It is to this flora that _Dacrydium cupressinum_,--so like a club moss in its foliage,--belongs; and _Podocarpus ferrugineus_,--a tree which more closely resembles in its foliage the Eathie conifer, save that its spiky leaves are somewhat narrower and longer than any other with which I am acquainted. About two thirds of the plants which cover the plains, or rise on the hill-sides of that country, are cryptogamic, consisting mainly of ferns and their allies; and it is a curious circ.u.mstance,--which was, however, not without precedent in the merely physical conditions of the Oolitic flora of Scotland,--that so shallow is the soil even where its greatest forests have sprung up, and so immediately does the rock lie below, that the central axes of the trees do not elongate downwards into a tap, but throw out horizontally on every side a thick network of roots, which rises so high over the surface as to render walking through the woods a difficult and very fatiguing exercise. The flora of the Oolite, like that of New Zealand, seems to have been in large part cryptogamic, consisting of ferns and the allied horse-tail and club moss families. Its forests seem to have contained only cone-bearing trees; at least among the many thousand specimens of its fossil woods which have been examined, no tissue of the true, dicotyledonous character has yet been found; and with the exception of the leaves just described, all those yet found in the System, which could have belonged to true trees, are of the acicular form common to the Coniferae, and show in their dense ligneous structure that they were persistent, not deciduous. Nor is there evidence wanting that many of the Coniferae of the period grew in so shallow a soil, that their tap-roots were flattened and bent backwards, and they were left to derive their sole support, like the trees of the New Zealand forests, from such of their roots as shot out horizontally. We even know the nature of the rock upon which they rested. As shown by fragments still locked up among the interstices of their petrified roots, it was an Old Red flagstone similar to that of Caithness in the neighborhood of Wick and Thurso, and containing the same fossil remains. In the water-rolled pebbles of the Conglomerate of Helmsdale and Port Gower,--pebbles encrusted by Oolitic corals, and enclosed in a calcareous paste, containing Oolitic belemnites and astreae,--I have found the well marked fishes and fucoids of the Old Red Sandstone. As shown by the appearance of the rounded ma.s.ses in which these lay, they must have presented as ancient an appearance in the times of the Lower Oolite as they do now; and the glimpse which they lent of so remote an antiquity, through the medium of an antiquity which, save for the comparison which they furnished the means of inst.i.tuting, might be well deemed superlatively remote, I have felt singularly awe-inspiring and impressive. Macaulay antic.i.p.ates a time when the traveller from some distant land shall take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to survey the ruins of St.

Paul's. In disinterring from amid the antique remains of the Oolite the immensely more antique remains of the Old Red Sandstone, I have felt as such a traveller would feel if, on setting himself to dig among the scattered heaps for memorials of the ruined city, he had fallen on what had been once the a.s.syrian Gallery of the British Museum, and had found mingling with the antiquities of perished London the greatly older and more venerable antiquities of Nineveh or of Babylon. The land of the Oolite in this northern locality must have been covered by a soil which,--except that from a lack of the boulder clays it must have been poorer and shallower,--must have not a little resembled that of the lower plains of Cromarty, Caithness, and Eastern Ross. And on this Palaeozoic platform, long exposed, as the Oolitic Conglomerates abundantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies,--a platform beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea level, and washed in the interior by rivers, with here a tall hill or abrupt precipice, and there a flat plain or sluggish mora.s.s,--there grew vast forests of cone-bearing trees, tangled thickets of gigantic equisetaceae, numerous forms of Cycas and Zamia, and wide-rolling seas of fern, amid whose open s.p.a.ces club mosses of extinct tribes sent forth their long, creeping stems, spiky and dry, and thickly mottled with pseudo-spore-bearing catkins.

The curtain drops over this ancient flora of the Oolite in Scotland; and when, long after, there is a corner of the thick enveloping screen withdrawn, and we catch a partial glimpse of one of the old Tertiary forests of our country, all is new. Trees of the high dicotyledonous cla.s.s, allied to the plane and the buckthorn, prevail in the landscape, intermingled, however, with dingy funereal yews; and the ferns and equisetae that rise in the darker openings of the wood approach to the existing type. And yet, though _eons_ of the past eternity have elapsed since we looked out upon Cycas and Zamia, and the last of the Calamites, the time is still early, and long ages must lapse ere man shall arise out of the dust, to keep and to dress fields waving with the productions of yet another and different flora, and to busy himself with all the labor which he taketh under the sun. Our country, in this Tertiary time, has still its great outbursts of molten matter, that bury in fiery deluges many feet in depth, and many square miles in extent, the debris of wide tracts of woodland and marsh; and the basaltic columns still form in its great lava bed; and ever and anon, as the volcanic agencies awake, clouds of ashes darken the heavens, and cover up the landscape as if with acc.u.mulated drifts of a protracted snow storm. Who shall declare what, throughout those long ages, the history of creation has been? We see at wide intervals the mere fragments of successive floras; but know not how what seem the blank inters.p.a.ces were filled, or how, as extinction overtook in succession one tribe of existences after another, and species, like individuals, yielded to the great law of death, yet other species were brought to the birth, and ushered upon the scene, and the chain of being was maintained unbroken. We see only detached bits of that green web which has covered our earth ever since the dry land first appeared; but the web itself seems to have been continuous throughout all time; though ever as breadth after breadth issued from the creative loom, the pattern has altered, and the sculpturesque and graceful forms that ill.u.s.trated its first beginnings and its middle s.p.a.ces have yielded to flowers of richer color and blow, and fruits of fairer shade and outline; and for gigantic club mosses stretching forth their hirsute arms, goodly trees of the Lord have expanded their great boughs; and for the barren fern and the calamite, cl.u.s.tering in thickets beside the waters, or spreading on flowerless hill slopes, luxuriant orchards have yielded their ruddy flush, and rich harvests their golden gleam.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Prayer will be found at the end of these Memorials.

[2] The same revolver proved to be the instrument of death to another person, two days after. The circ.u.mstances are thus related in the _Edinburgh Witness_ of December 27:--