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When told that the new dredgings prove that "we are still living in the Chalk Period," we naturally ask whether some cuttle-fish has been found with a Belemnite forming part of its internal framework; or have Ammonites, Baculites, Hamites, Turrilites, with four or five other Cephalopodous genera characteristic of the chalk and unknown as tertiary, been met with in the abysses of the ocean?
And as the queen's spaniel was found, so happily has the animal of the Belemnite; a few exceptionally preserved specimens have been discovered, which completely verify the retrospective prophecy of those who interpreted the facts of the case by due application of the method of Zadig.
In the whole of the English Lias there are at present known about 937 species of mollusca, and of these 267 are Cephalopods, of which class more than two-thirds are Ammonites, the Nautilus and Belemnite also abounding.
It is said truly that the Ammonite, Orthoceras, and Nautilus of these ancient rocks were of the tetrabranchiate division, and none of them so highly organised as the Belemnite and other dibranchiate cephalopods which afterwards appeared, and some of which now flourish in our seas. Therefore, we may infer that the simplest forms of the Cephalopoda took precedence of the more complex in time.
The octopus of our own time has advanced still further, and become the most powerful of the invertebrates. The ink-bags of the Belemnite also are sometimes preserved, and we see how it could balk a pursuer by darkening the waters. It was a compensating advantage for the loss of the shell. In all the other classes of aquatic animals we find corresponding advances.
His first movement of indignation was to seize the dog with no gentle hand. She whined loudly; and Leonard, whom he had not seen, shouted angrily, 'Let her alone; then, at another cry from her, finding his advance to her rescue impeded by a barricade of the crowded and disarranged furniture, he grew mad with passion, and launched the stone in his hand, a long sharp-pointed belemnite.
Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian tomahawk. Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.
Nevertheless, seeing that there is nothing in nature at all like the chambered shell of the Belemnite, except the shells of the Nautilus and of the Spirula, it was legitimate to prophesy that the animal from which the fossil proceeded must have belonged to the group of the Cephalopoda.
The day of the ammonite and the belemnite also now drew to a close, and only a few of these cephalopods were left to survive the period. It is therefore at the close of the Cretaceous that the line is drawn which marks the end of the Middle Age of geology and the beginning of the Cenozoic era, the era of modern life, the Age of Mammals.
Its tentacula, sent abroad over the summit of the shell, searched the sea for prey. The creature had an ink-bag, with which it could muddle the water around it, to protect itself from more powerful animals, and, strange to say, this has been found so well preserved that an artist has used it in one instance as a paint, wherewith to delineate the belemnite itself.
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