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If you washed and brushed that chalk into powder, you would find it full of little things like the Dentalina in this drawing, and many other curious forms. I will show you some under the microscope one day. They are the shells of animals called Foraminifera, because the shells of some of them are full of holes, through which they put out tiny arms.
In certain areas of the open seas the upper part of the water is dwelt in by a host of creatures, mostly foraminifera, which extract limestone from the water, and, on dying, send their shells to the bottom.
Notwithstanding the antiquity of this Russian formation, it should be stated that both of these genera of brachiopods have been also found in the Upper Silurian of England, i.e. In the Wenlock limestone. Among the green grains of the sandy strata above-mentioned, Professor Ehrenberg announced in 1854 his discovery of remains of foraminifera. Clinton Group: Beds of Passage, Llandovery Group.
Especially, I think, is this true of the lowest organisms, many of which show great beauty of form, of a kind that appears to be altogether due to symmetry of growth; as the beautiful star-like rayed forms of the acanthometræ, which are low animal organisms not very different from the Foraminifera."
Then in 1841 a gentleman named Edward Forbes, now with God whose name will be for ever dear to all who love science, and honour genius and virtue, found in the AEgean Sea "a bed of chalk," he said, "full of Foraminifera, and shells of Pteropods," forming at the bottom of the sea. And what are Pteropods? Here are drawings of them. 1.
They gave every evidence of wishing to help me; but of course if I had not forgotten that one cannot assume from the statements "not-Leopard implies Boomer Duke" and "not-Leopard implies Foraminifera 9" that, qued, "Boomer Duke implies Foraminifera 9" ... if I had not forgotten this, I say, I should not have been "deceived." For in practice they were as little favorable to me as the Leopards.
Contemporaneously with these observations, the indefatigable Ehrenberg had discovered that the "greensands" of the geologist were largely made up of casts of a similar character, and proved the existence of Foraminifera at a very ancient geological epoch, by discovering such casts in a greensand of Lower Silurian age, which occurs near St. Petersburg. Subsequently, Messrs.
"There seems to be no room left for doubt that the red clay is essentially the insoluble residue, the ash, as it were, of the calcareous organisms which form the Globigerina ooze, after the calcareous matter has been by some means removed. An ordinary mixture of calcareous Foraminifera with the shells of pteropods, forming a fair sample of Globigerina ooze from near St.
In none of the Belgian Lower Miocene strata could I find any nummulites; and M. d'Archiac had previously observed that these foraminifera characterise his "Lower Tertiary Series," as contrasted with the Middle, and they therefore serve as a good test of age between Eocene and Miocene, at least in Belgium and the North of France.
The egg of the organism, still more magnified, is also seen. To vary our examples and still progress. We all know the appearance and structure of chalk. The minute foraminifera have, by their accumulated tests, mainly built up its enormous masses.
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