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Quite recently, the Orthoceras, previously supposed to be a type exclusively palæozoic, has been detected along with mesozoic Ammonites and Belemnites. Yet hosts of such experiences fail to extinguish the assumption, that the age of a stratum may be determined by the occurrence in it of a single fossil form. Nay, this assumption survives evidence of even a still more destructive kind.

Not only have by far the most of the now extinct genera and species their family and stem-companions, and many even their genera and species companions, in the living world, but also those genera whose nearer relations are now extinct as, for instance, the club-moss-trees, the trilobites, the ammonites, the belemnites, the sauria, the nummulites, show still a very perceptible relationship with living genera, and can be quite accurately included in the botanical and zoölogical systems; nay, they even fill up gaps in it.

And when we recollect that these things coincide with the extinction of the Ammonites and Belemnites, and the driving of their descendants further south, as well as the rise and triumph of deciduous trees, it is difficult to see any ground for hesitating. But we need not, and must not, imagine a period of cold as severe, prolonged, and general as that of the Permian period.

"It was," he writes, "while living at Barton that I obtained my first information that there was such a science as geology.... My brother, like most land-surveyors, was something of a geologist, and he showed me the fossil oysters of the genus Gryphæa and the Belemnites ... and several other fossils which were abundant in the chalk and gravel around Barton.... It was here, too, that during my solitary rambles I first began to feel the influence of nature and to wish to know more of the various flowers, shrubs and trees I daily met with, but of which for the most part I did not even know the English names.

When the Challenger's trawl brings up an Ichthyosaurus, along with a few living specimens of Belemnites and Turrilites, it may be admitted that she has come upon a cretaceous "outlier."

"The fawn-coloured fossils from his coralline limestone are evidently the same as those of the tertiary formation along the south-east coast of Arabia, and therefore the same as those of Cutch; and it is exceedingly interesting to find that among the blue-coloured fossils which are accompanied by specimens of the blue shale, composing the beds from which they have been weathered out, are species of Terebratula Belemnites, identical with those figured in Grant's Geology of Cutch; thus enabling us to extend those beds of the Jurassic formation which exist in Cutch, and along the south-eastern coast of Arabia, across to Africa."

Now there is no mineral body which presents any structure comparable to this, and the conclusion suggested itself that the Belemnites must be the effects of causes other than those which are at work in inorganic nature.

In the caves near the stations occupied by primeval men we find little bits of fossil coral, beads of hardened clay, the teeth of bears, wolves, and foxes, boars' tusks, and the jawbones of small mammals, fish-bones, and belemnites pierced with holes, and intended to be used as amulets or ornaments to be worn round the neck.

In what sense can Loligo or Spirula be said to be more specialised, or less embryonic, than Belemnites; or the modern species of Lamellibranch and Gasteropod genera, than the Silurian species of the same genera?

where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt is particularly well indicated. In every part of Europe belemnites and stone hatchets are alike regarded as thunderbolts; so that we have the curious result that people confuse under a single name a natural fossil of immense antiquity and a human product of comparatively recent but still prehistoric date.