The Testimony of the Rocks Part 5

"And marjoram sweet in shepherd's posie found, And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom Shall be erewhile in arid bundles bound, To lurk amid her labors of the loom, And crown her kerchiefs clean with meikle rare perfume.

"And here trim rosemary, that whilom crowned The daintiest garden of the proudest peer, Ere, driven from its envied site, it found A sacred shelter for its branches here, Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear, With h.o.r.ehound gray, and mint of softer green."

All the plants here enumerated belong to the l.a.b.i.ate family; which, though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have still their products favorably received in the very best society. The rosemary, whose banishment from the gardens of the great he specially records, enters largely in the composition of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one species (_Lavendula vera_) yields the well known lavender oil, and another (_L. latifolio_) the spike oil. The peppermint (_Meantha viridus_) furnishes the essence so popular under that name among our confectioners; and one of the most valued perfumes of the East (next to the famous _Attar_, a product of the Rosaceae) is the oil of the _Patchouly_ plant, another of the l.a.b.i.ates. Let me indulge, ere quitting this part of the subject, in a single remark. There have been cla.s.ses of religionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and well known on the Continent, who have deemed it a merit to deny themselves every pleasure of sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape; and the Port Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for their side of the argument, that they seemed as if warring with Providence, seeing that the favors which he was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience to the stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. But it is better, surely, to be on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns, than on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The great Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly for all his creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely better than we do ourselves; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in churlishly refusing to partake of that ample entertainment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished with roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed hour of our appearance at the feast. This we also know, that when the Divine Man came into the world,--unlike the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the temperate use of any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of spikenard, very precious" (a product of the l.a.b.i.ate family), with which Mary anointed his feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 44.

CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI.

(A Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 45.

FOSSIL DRAGON-FLY.

Solenhofen.]

Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us antic.i.p.ate here, for the sake of the ill.u.s.tration which it affords, one of the sections of the other great division of our subject,--that which treats of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of insects, in order that we may mark the peculiar light which it casts on the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent place,--carnivorous arachnidae of ill repute, that live under stones and fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions there occur c.o.c.kroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones, and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, ma.n.u.scripts, leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured indiscriminately by the recent _Blatta gigantea_ of the warmer parts of the globe,--one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler, or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it, though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the c.o.c.kroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves.

a.s.suredly, if the ancient _Blattae_ were as little nice in their eating as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. With these ancient c.o.c.kroaches a few locusts and beetles have been found a.s.sociated, together with a small _Tinea_,--a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a _Phasmia_,--a creature related to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food among the conifers; the _Phasmidae_ and gra.s.shoppers would have lived on the tender shoots of the less rigid plants their contemporaries; the _Tinea_, probably on ligneous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the system yet produced of the now numerous kinds that seek their food among flowers. In the Oolitic ages, however, insects become greatly more numerous,--so numerous that they seemed to have formed almost exclusively the food of the earliest mammals, and apparently also of some of the flying reptiles of the time. The magnificent dragon-flies, the carnivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant; and we now know, that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons to the weaker insects, they themselves were devoured by dragons as truly such as were ever yet feigned by romancer of the middle ages. Ants were also common, with crickets, gra.s.shoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles, two-winged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding carboniferous ones, the disgusting c.o.c.kroaches. And for the first time amid the remains of a flora that seems to have had its few flowers,--though flowers could have formed no conspicuous feature in even an Oolitic landscape,--we detect in a few broken fragments of the wings of b.u.t.terflies, decided trace of the flower-sucking insects. Not, however, until we enter into the great Tertiary division do these become numerous. The first bee makes its appearance in the amber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gem-like tomb,--an embalmed corpse in a crystal coffin,--along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees.

The first of the Bombycidae too,--insects that maybe seen suspended over flowers by the scarce visible vibrations of their wings, sucking the honied juices by means of their long, slender trunks,--also appear in the amber, a.s.sociated with moths, b.u.t.terflies, and a few caterpillars.

Bees and b.u.t.terflies are present in increased proportions in the latter Tertiary deposits: but not until that terminal creation to which we ourselves belong was ushered on the scene did they receive their fullest development. There is exquisite poetry in Wordsworth's reference to "the soft murmur of the vagrant bee,"--

"A slender sound, yet h.o.a.ry Time Doth to the soul exalt it with the chime Of all his years; a company Of ages coming, ages gone, Nations from before them sweeping."

And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history of this busy insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the creations that preceded it, and that as one great family--the gra.s.ses--were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he might enter in favoring circ.u.mstances upon his two earliest avocations, and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of the ground; and as another family of plants--the Rosaceae--was created in order that the gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress should have their trees "good for food and pleasant to the taste;" so flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to minister to that sense of beauty which distinguishes him from all the lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance: the geologist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye as certainly as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers. And,

"Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty, The shadow-casting race of trees survive: Thus in the train of spring arrive Sweet flowers: what living eye hath viewed Their myriads? endlessly renewed Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray, Where'er the subtile waters stray, Wherever sportive zephyrs bend Their course, or genial showers descend."

LECTURE SECOND.

THE PALaeONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS.

Amid the unceasing change and endless variety of nature there occur certain great radical ideas, that, while they form, if I may so express myself, the groundwork of the change,--the basis of the variety,--admit in themselves of no change or variety whatever. They const.i.tute the aye-enduring tissue on which the ever-changing patterns of creation are inscribed: the patterns are ever varying; the tissue which exhibits them for ever remains the same. In the animal kingdom, for instance, the prominent ideas have always been uniform. However much the faunas of the various geologic periods may have differed from each other, or from the fauna which now exists, in their general aspect and character, they were all, if I may so speak, equally underlaid by the great leading ideas which still const.i.tute the master types of animal life. And these leading ideas are four in number. _First_, there is the _star-like_ type of life,--life embodied in a form that, as in the corals, the sea-anemones, the sea-urchins, and the star-fishes, radiates outwards from a centre; _second_, there is the _articulated_ type of life,--life embodied in a form composed, as in the worms, crustaceans, and insects, of a series of rings united by their edges, but more or less moveable on each other; _third_, there is the bilateral or _molluscan_ type of life,--life embodied in a form in which there is a duality of corresponding parts, ranged, as in the cuttle-fishes, the clams, and the snails, on the sides of a central axis or plane; and _fourth_, there is the _vertebrate_ type of life,--life embodied in a form in which an internal skeleton is built up into two cavities placed the one over the other; the upper for the reception of the nervous centres, cerebral and spinal,--the lower for the lodgment of the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive organs. Such have been the four central ideas of the faunas of every succeeding creation, except perhaps the earliest of all, that of the Lower Silurian System, in which, so far as is yet known, only three of the number existed,--the radiated, articulated, and molluscan ideas or types. That Omnipotent Creator, infinite in his resources,--who, in at least the details of his workings, seems never yet to have repeated himself, but, as Lyell well expresses it, breaks, when the parents of a species have been moulded, the dye in which they were cast,--manifests himself, in these four great ideas, as the unchanging and unchangeable One. They serve to bind together the present with all the past; and determine the unity of the authorship of a wonderfully complicated design, executed on a groundwork broad as time, and whose scope and bearing are deep as eternity.

The fauna of the Silurian System bears in all its three great types the stamp of a fashion peculiarly antique, and which, save in a few of the mollusca, has long since become obsolete. Its radiate animals are chiefly corals, simple or compound, whose inhabitants may have somewhat resembled the sea-anemones; with zoophites, akin mayhap to the sea-pens, though the relationship must have been a remote one; and numerous crinoids, or stone lilies, some of which consisted of but a sculptured calyx without petals, while others threw off a series of long, flexible arms, that divided and subdivided like the branches of a tree, and were thickly fringed by hair-like fibres. There is great variety and beauty among these Silurian crinoids; and, from the ornate sculpture of their groined and ribbed _capitals_ and slender _columns_, the Gothic architect might borrow not a few striking ideas.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 46.

CYATHAXONIA DALMANI.]

The difference between the older and newer fashions, as exemplified in the cup-shaped corals, may be indicated in a single sentence. The ancient corals were stars of four rays, or of multiples of four; the modern corals are stars of six rays, or of multiples of six. But though, at a certain definite period,--that during which the great Palaeozoic division ended and the Secondary division began--nature, in forming this cla.s.s of creatures, discarded the number four, and adopted instead the number six, the great leading idea of the star itself was equally retained in corals of the modern as in those of the more ancient type.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 47.

GLYPTOCRINUS DECADACTYLUS.

(Hudson River Group, Lower Silurian.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 48.

CALYMENE BLUMENBACHII.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 49.

ORTHISINA VERNEUILI.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 50.

LITUITES CORNU-ARIETIS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 51.

LINGULA LOWISII.]

The articulata of the Silurian period bore a still more peculiar character. They consisted mainly of the Trilobites,--a family in whose nicely-jointed sh.e.l.ls the armorer of the middle ages might have found almost all the contrivances of his craft, antic.i.p.ated, with not a few besides which he had failed to discover; and which, after receiving so immense a development during the middle and later times of the Silurian period, that whole rocks were formed almost exclusively of their remains, gradually died out in the times of the Old Red Sandstone, and disappeared for ever from creation after the Carboniferous Limestone had been deposited. The Palaeontologist knows no more unique family than that of the Trilobites, or a family more unlike any which now exists, or a family which marks with more certainty the early rocks in which they occur. And yet, though formed in a fashion that perished myriads of ages ago, how admirably does it not exhibit the articulated type of being, and ill.u.s.trate that unity of design which, amid endless diversity, pervades all nature. The mollusca of the Silurians ranged from the high cephalopoda, represented in our existing seas by the nautili and the cuttle-fishes, to the low brachipods, some of whose congeners may still be detected in the terebratula of our Highland lochs and bays, and some in the lingulae of the southern hemisphere. The cephalopods of the system are all of an obsolete type, that disappeared myriads of ages ago,--a remark which, with the exceptions just intimated, and perhaps one or two others, applies equally to its brachipods; but of at least two of its intermediate families,--the gasteropoda and lamellibranchiata,--several of the forms resemble those of recent sh.e.l.ls of the temperate lat.i.tudes. In its general aspect, however, the Silurian fauna, antiquely fashioned, as I have said, as became its place in the primeval ages of existence, was unlike any other which the world ever saw; and the absence of the vertebrata, or at least the inconspicuous place which they occupied if they were at all present, must have imparted to the whole, as a group, a humble and mediocre character. It seems to have been for many ages together a creation of molluscs, corals, and Crustacea. At length, in an upper bed of the system, immediately under the base of the Old Red Sandstone, the remains of the earliest known fishes appear, blent with what also appears for the first time,--the fragmentary remains of a terrestrial vegetation.

The rocks beneath this ancient bone-bed have yielded, as I have already said, no trace of any plant higher than the Thallogens, or at least not higher than the Zosteracea,--plants whose proper habitat is the sea; but, through an apparently simultaneous advance of the two kingdoms, animal and vegetable,--though of course the simultaneousness may be but merely apparent,--the first land plants and the first vertebrates appear together in the same deposit.

What, let us inquire, is the character of these ancient fishes, that first complete the scale of animated nature in its four master ideas, by adding the vertebrate to the invertebrate divisions? So far as is yet known, they all consist of one well marked order,--that placoidal order of Aga.s.siz that to an internal framework of cartilage adds an external armature, consisting of plates, spines, and s.h.a.green points of solid bone. Either of the two kinds of dog-fishes on our coasts,--the spiked or spotted,--maybe accepted as not inadequate representatives of this order as it now exists. The Port Jackson shark, however,--a creature that to the dorsal spines and s.h.a.green-covered skin of the common dog-fish adds a mouth terminal at the snout, not placed beneath, as in most other sharks, and a palate covered with a dense pavement of crushing teeth,--better ill.u.s.trates the order as it first appeared in creation than any of our British placoids.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 52.

PORT JACKSON SHARK.

(Cestracion Phillippi.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration:

Fig. 53.[13]

----------------------- Silurian.

-----+-----------------Placoid.

| | Ganoid.

Old Red. | | -----+----+------------ | | Carboniferous. | | -----+----+------------ Permian. | | -----+----+------------ Tria.s.sic. | | -----+----+------------ | | Oolitic. | | -----+----+----+----+-- Cretaceous. | | | | Ctenoid and Cycloid.

| | | | -----+----+----+----+-- Tertiary. | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+-- Geologic [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement.

Aga.s.siz's [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement.

THE GENEALOGY OF FISHES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 54.

AMBLYPTERUS MACROPTERTUS.

From the Coal at Saarbruck.

(A Ganoid of the Carboniferous System.)]