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The following list, which includes every account which I have hitherto met with of the discovery of fossil mammiferous remains in the Pampas, may be hereafter useful to a geologist investigating this region, and it tends to show their extraordinary abundance.
He had already given up the supposition of those vertical or highly inclined strata having been formed in their present position; but had this geologist seen that it was the same cause by which those strata had both been raised in their place and softened in their substance, I am persuaded that he would have freely acknowledged, in this zig-zag shape, which is so common in the alpine strata, the fullest evidence of the softening and the elevating power.
The mud and sand in which their frames are entombed, as they die, will one day be the "Cambrian" rocks of the geologist, and reveal to him their forms and suggest their habits. No great volcanic age will reduce them to streaks of shapeless carbon. The earth now buries its dead, and from their petrified remains we conjure up a picture of the swarming life of the Cambrian ocean.
Elie de Beaumont, the French geologist, who has carefully examined the district, says that at the Montagne d'Oisans he found the granite in some places resting upon the limestone, cutting through the Calcareous beds, rising like a wall and lapping over them.
In this case, the palaeontologist is called upon suddenly to intercalate about 800 species of Mollusca and Radiata, between the fauna of the Lower Lias and that of the Middle Trias. The period in question was previously believed, even by many a philosophical geologist, to have been comparatively barren of organic types.
I do not suppose that, at the present day, any geologist would be found to maintain absolute Uniformitarianism, to deny that the rapidity of the rotation of the earth may be diminishing, that the sun may be waxing dim, or that the earth itself may be cooling.
The geologist on hearing this will probably refer back in his mind to the Secondary epochs, when lizards, some herbivorous, some carnivorous, and of dimensions comparable only with our existing whales, swarmed on the land and in the sea.
"Coming back to that commission again: instead of trying out a democratic form of government, in which every citizen would be equally responsible regardless of property they've standardized the protective, paternalistic principle." "Which is precisely the correct method!" insisted the geologist. "Radical changes of any kind are always dangerous.
From earlier chapters we now expect to find a warmer climate, and the record gives abundant proof of it. To this period belongs the "London Clay," in whose thick and to the unskilled eye insignificant bed the geologist reads the remarkable story of what London was two or three million years ago.
Originally the human was only slightly different from the apes he associated with. There was perhaps only one slight point of superiority; today there are millions of such points. Man is infinitely superior, now, and it's all because he was slightly superior, then." "Suppose we grant that," remarked the geologist. "What then? Does that explain why the bees have made good on Sanus?"
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