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I strongly imagine that if it were not for the peculiar appearance that fossilised animals have, any of you might readily walk through a museum which contains fossil remains mixed up with those of the present forms of life, and I doubt very much whether your uninstructed eyes would lead you to see any vast or wonderful difference between the two.
And, although ancient club-mosses have been found in a fossilised condition at least forty-nine feet high, the spores are no larger than those of our miniature club-mosses of the present day. The spores are more or less composed of pure bitumen, and the bituminous nature of the coal depends largely on the presence or absence of these microscopic bodies in it.
"There is a collection of fossilised remains in the museum here, the study of which will afford me the greatest pleasure and interest." The girls laughed heartily. "I think you and I," Quest suggested, turning to them, "will part company with the Professor!" Quest and Lenora turned away from the window of the hotel, out of which they had been gazing for the last quarter of an hour.
If she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of osteology and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this workaday world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his fossilised wisdom to the ignorance of a child of sixteen or seventeen.
Alfieri, heaven knows, had been selfish and self-engrossed; but, perhaps because he was selfish and self-engrossed, because he was always listening to his own ideas, and nursing his own feelings, Alfieri had been passionate and loving; and, as we have seen, while he seemed growing daily more fossilised, while he was at once engrossed with his own schemes of literary glory, and indifferently amusing himself by infidelities to his lady, he was then, even then, constantly haunted by the thought that, unless he himself were left behind in the terrors of widowhood, the Countess of Albany would have to suffer those pangs which he felt that he himself could never endure.
But the accidental discovery of Belemnites in due connection with black elongated masses which were: certainly fossilised ink-bags, inasmuch as the ink could be ground up and used for painting as well as if it were recent sepia, settled the question; and it became perfectly safe to prophesy that the creature which fabricated the Belemnite was a two-gilled cephalopod with suckers on its arms, and with all the other essential features of our living squids, cuttle-fishes, and Spirulae.
In a letter of the 16th of April, 1881, he asks G.J. Romanes to consider the problem: "I do not know," he says "whether you will discuss in your book on the mind of animals any of the more complex and wonderful instincts. It is unsatisfactory work, as there can be no fossilised instincts, and the sole guide is their state in other members of the same order, and mere PROBABILITY.
Now, however, it was plain that a warning had been given which did not come from the fossilised officials of the Foreign Office, and which impressed so cool an old soldier as Captain Sarrasin with a sense of serious danger. As far as regarded all the ordinary affairs of life, Rivers looked down on Sarrasin with a quite unutterable contempt.
But I must remind the reader that the case above proposed has no pretensions to be regarded as an exact parallel to the geological phenomena which I desire to illustrate; for the commissioners are supposed to visit the different provinces in rotation; whereas the commemorating processes by which organic remains become fossilised, although they are always shifting from one area to the other, are yet very irregular in their movements.
Most men who had practised rigid economy for twenty years, whose hours, and days, and weeks had been occupied with little petty details, how to save a penny here and a fourpenny bit yonder, would have become fossilised in the process. Their minds would have become as narrow as their ways. They would have shrunk from any venture, and continued in the old course to the end of their time.
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