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Radiata, mollusca, feathers, flowers, ferns, mosses, palms, pines, grain-fields, leaves of cedar, chestnut, elm, acanthus: these and multitudes of other objects are figured on your frosty window; on sixteen different panes I have counted sixteen patterns strikingly distinct, and it appeared like a show-case for the globe.
This leads me to mention, that although the number of New Zealand landshells hitherto described scarcely exceeds a dozen, this does not imply any scarcity of such objects in the country, as an industrious collector from Sydney, who spent nine months on the northern and middle islands, obtained nearly a hundred species of terrestrial and fluviatile mollusca.
From the continent being narrow in the southern-most parts of Patagonia, and from the shells found at the Inner Narrows of the Strait of Magellan, and likewise far up the valley of the Santa Cruz, it is probable that the southern part of the western coast, which was not visited by me, has been elevated within the period of recent Mollusca: if so, the shores of the Pacific have been continuously, recently, and in a geological sense synchronously upraised, from Lima for a length of 2,480 nautical miles southward, a distance equal to that from the Red Sea to the North Cape of Scandinavia!
Its age is doubtless more remote than historic times, and no geologist will believe that it is the work of the mollusca of our seas. From the Cayo de Piedras we could faintly discern in the direction of east-north-east the lofty mountains that rise beyond the bay of Xagua.
During this interval, we employed ourselves in preparing the plants we had collected in the beautiful valleys of Galicia, which no naturalist had yet visited: we examined the fuci and the mollusca which the north-west winds had cast with great profusion at the foot of the steep rock, on which the lighthouse of the Tower of Hercules is built.
If I had worked my way from a sponge instead of a lobster, I should have found it associated, by like ties, with a great number of other animals into the sub-kingdom 'Protozoa'; if I had selected a fresh-water polype or a coral, the members of what naturalists term the sub-kingdom 'Coelenterata', would have grouped themselves around my type; had a snail been chosen, the inhabitants of all univalve and bivalve, land and water, shells, the lamp shells, the squids, and the sea-mat would have gradually linked themselves on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom of 'Mollusca'; and finally, starting from man, I should have been compelled to admit first, the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the same class; and then the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and the fish, into the same sub-kingdom of 'Vertebrata'.
And so definitely and precisely marked is the structure of each animal, that, in the present state of our knowledge, there is not the least evidence to prove that a form, in the slightest degree transitional between any of the two groups Vertebrata, Annulosa, Mollusca, and Cælenterata, either exists, or has existed, during that period of the earth's history which is recorded by the geologist.
Not to particularize this circumstance as true of divers species of sharks, cuttle-fish, and many others of the larger varieties of the finny tribes; the myriads of microscopic mollusca, well known to swarm off soundings, might alone be deemed almost sufficient to kindle a fire in the brine. But these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain. After science comes sentiment.
In the lower division of the Speeton clay, 200 feet thick, 46 species of mollusca have been found, and three divisions, each characterised by its peculiar ammonite, have been noticed by Mr. Judd.
He was the author of The Jurassic Deposits of Norfolk, with Some Remarks on the Kimeridge Clay an exhaustive study of the geological formation of the county and the remains of prehistoric reptiles, fishes, mollusca and crustacea which had been discovered therein.
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