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But the tide as a whole must have steadily risen, because the progression from lower to higher forms has gone steadily forward. The lower forms have come along; Nature has left nothing behind. The radiates, the articulates, the mollusca, are still with us, but in the midst of these the higher and higher forms have been constantly appearing. The great biological tree has got its growth.
In many large coal-fields we continue as much in the dark respecting the invertebrate air-breathers then living, as if the coal had been thrown down in mid-ocean. The early date of the carboniferous strata can not explain the enigma, because we know that while the land supported a luxuriant vegetation, the contemporaneous seas swarmed with life with Articulata, Mollusca, Radiata, and Fishes.
These gigantic quadrupeds, therefore, though belonging to extinct genera and families, coexisted with the twenty above-enumerated Mollusca, the barnacle and two corals, still living on this coast.
But it was necessary to show the descent of the vertebrates from the lower forms. In order to respond to such a necessity, men sometimes reverse their conclusions. Although favorably disposed to the doctrine of the transmutation of the animalic forms, I want a complete proof before I can believe in a transformation of the vertebrate type into that of the mollusca."
The next oldest animal organisms found in the Cambrian formation are the zoöphytes, and immediately above them the mollusca and the crustacea.
The Caradoc sandstone was originally so named by Sir R.I. Murchison from the mountain called Caer Caradoc, in Shropshire; it consists of shelly sandstones of great thickness, and sometimes containing much calcareous matter. Nothing is more remarkable in these beds, and in the Silurian strata generally of all countries, than the preponderance of brachiopoda over other forms of mollusca.
Now as to the organic world, it is largely admitted that numerous tertiary species have continued down into the quaternary, and many of them to the present time. A goodly percentage of the earlier and nearly half of the later tertiary mollusca, according to Des Hayes, Lyell, and, if we mistake not, Bronn, still live.
The solid surface of the inferior limestone has also been bored, so as to exhibit cylindrical and pear-shaped cavities, as at c, the work of saxicavous mollusca; and many rents, as at b, which descend several feet or yards into the limestone, have been filled with sand and shells, similar to those in the stratum a.
In that of San Ciro, on the east side of the bay, we find at the bottom sand with marine shells, forty species of which have been examined, and found almost all to agree specifically with mollusca now inhabiting the Mediterranean.
Geographical Distribution, another witness claimed by the evolutionists, bears testimony, which they are bound, in law, to receive. We find animals whose power of locomotion is very limited, scattered all over the world, like the mollusca and crustacea, embracing a large number of families, genera, and species.
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