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This was a strange place, and in our search we found geodes, petrified snakes, and short sections of fish. We also found several petrified jaw-bones, of what looked to be wolves, still containing the teeth, and fossils of many kinds. Some looked like vegetables, some were hexagonal, and some looked as though made of floor tiling. We found many water and moss agates of various sizes.
Some of the fossils which I collected were found a good way down the western slope of the main ridge, and hence must originally have been covered up by a great thickness of the black shaly rock, independently of the now denuded, thick, overlying masses of red sandstone.
A generation after Newton's death fossils were referred for their origin to a certain "plastic power" in Nature mere idle whittlings of bone that had never known an outfit of flesh and blood. Then came a long and motley procession of cosmogonies, every speculator, from John Wesley down to Pye Smith, insisting warmly on what seemed good in his own eyes.
And Leonardo da Vinci had advanced in geology to the conception of the deposition of marine strata as the origin of fossils. Our present purpose does not require that we should give particulars. All that it here concerns us to do is to illustrate the consensus subsisting in this stage of growth, and afterwards. Let us look at a few cases.
To-morrow there's to be a tremendous low tide that will leave a lot of it uncovered, and Merrifield and I mean to dig it out, and if there are some duplicate bits they may be had for the bazaar." "Yes, they have been begging Fergus's duplicates for a collection of fossils," said Anna. "But can it be safe? A low tide means a high tide, you know." "Bosh!" returned Adrian.
I renewed my chemical experiments; I sought to invigorate my mind by other branches of science which I had hitherto less cultured, meditated new theories on Light and Colour, collected specimens in Natural History, subjected animalcules to my microscope, geological fossils to my hammer.
These curious creatures, genuine living fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; the ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed feet, and a great many quaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds and reptiles.
With the exception of deposits containing recent shells and of quite insignificant dimensions, no tertiary formations have been observed on this coast, for a space of twenty-two degrees of latitude north of Copiapo, until coming to Payta, where there is said to be a considerable calcareous deposit: a few fossils have been described by M. d'Orbigny from this place, namely:
As at Adulis and Koloe there were no inscriptions which could materially assist us; this may be partly accounted for by the subsequent Mohammedan occupation, when the temples were converted into mosques, but besides this the nature of the stone employed at all these places would make it very difficult to use it for inscribing letters: it is very coarse, and full of enormous fossils.
"Sure," said that strange creature, her keen eyes glancing about my room; "you don't deserve half I've done for you not letting me know beforehand ." "Or me!" Kitty broke in. "Oh, I've have given a a tube of chrome yellow to see you!" " but we've made the Row look like nineteen cents in a country where they don't use money. See you've got the fossils."
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