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He had surrendered all his favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism except for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and Pteraspis and ice age and tramways and telephones; and now just when he was ready to hang the crowning garland on the brow of a completed education science itself warned him to begin it again from the beginning.
Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass or whatever there was to nibble in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of fishes.
For anything he, or any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution out of a thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis . To an American in search of a father, it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet.
In Caithness, however, many hundred feet below the fish-zone of the middle division, remains of Pteraspis were found by Mr. Peach in 1861.
One might mix up the terms of time as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past, measuring time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria.
Until 1859 there was no example of a fossil fish older than the bone-bed of the Upper Ludlow, but in that year a specimen of Pteraspis was found at Church Hill, near Leintwardine, in Shropshire, by Mr.
The third or lowest division south of the Grampians consists of grey paving- stone and roofing-slate, with associated red and grey shales; these strata underlie a dense mass of conglomerate. A species of Pteraspis, of the same family, has also been found by the Reverend Hugh Mitchell in beds of corresponding age in Perthshire; and Mr.
This discovery is of no small interest as bearing on the theory of progressive development, because, according to Professor Huxley, the genus Pteraspis is allied to the sturgeon, and therefore by no means of low grade in the piscine class. It is a fact well worthy of notice that no remains of vertebrata have yet been met with in any strata older than the Lower Ludlow.
The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying discovery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very much concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present.
That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child.
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