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Also, when fossil wood has been condensed by compression and changed by the operation of heat, as it is frequently found in argillaceous strata, particularly in the aluminous rock upon the coast of Yorkshire, it becomes a jet almost undistinguishable from some species of fossil coal.
But it would be still very remarkable, since it has all the characters of a goat-like creature in the shape of its skull, its bony horn-cores, its limb-bones, and its cheek-teeth; and yet, as it were monstrously and in a most disconcerting way, protrudes from its lower jaw two great rats' teeth. Nothing like it or approaching it or suggesting it, is known among recent or fossil Ruminants.
The occurrence of historical facts is said to be demonstrated, when the evidence that they happened is of such a character as to render the assumption that they did not happen in the highest degree improbable; and the question I now have to deal with is, whether evidence in favour of the evolution of animals of this degree of cogency is, or is not, obtainable from the record of the succession of living forms which is presented to us by fossil remains.
Natural selection for survival necessarily implies extinction of all that are not selected to survive, so that fossil remains are now the only procurable evidence that any of these latter that have long been extinct ever existed.
Among the fossil species, one or two appear to be entirely extinct, and a larger number have disappeared from the fauna of the Madeiran Archipelago, though still extant in Africa and Europe. Many which were amongst the most common in the Pliocene period, have now become the scarcest, and others formerly scarce, are now most numerously represented.
In like manner, among the mammalia we find in Australia not only living kangaroos and wombats, but fossil individuals of extinct species of the same genera. So also there are recent and fossil sloths, armadilloes and other Edentata in South America, and living and extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and bear in the great Europeo-Asiatic continent.
Agassiz especially emphasized and maintained the universality of the fact that there was a remarkable parallelism between embryos of later forms and adults of old or fossil groups. The embryos of higher forms, he said, pass through and beyond certain stages of structure, which are permanent in lower and older members of the same group.
Have they been blown on to the lake, or left behind by man? or are they fossil trees, integral parts of the vegetable stratum below which is continually rolling upward? or are they of both kinds? I do not know. Only this is certain, as Messrs. We pushed on across the lake, over the planks which the Negroes laid down from island to island.
Towards the close of our voyage I received a letter whilst at Ascension, in which my sisters told me that Sedgwick had called on my father, and said that I should take a place among the leading scientific men. My collection of fossil bones, which had been sent to Henslow, also excited considerable attention amongst palaeontologists.
I said Damascus was an old fossil, and she is. Any where else we would have been assailed by a clamorous army of donkey-drivers, guides, peddlers and beggars but in Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in Damascus streets.
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