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If, then, between the lowest fossiliferous formations and the most recent, there exists this degree of community; must we not infer that there will probably often exist a great degree of community between strata that are far from contemporaneous?
This, of course, implies either that spontaneous generation on the most astounding scale, and of animals such as horses and elephants, has been going on, as a natural process, through all the time recorded by the fossiliferous rocks; or it necessitates the belief in innumerable acts of creation repeated innumerable times.
The main points of interest consist, first in some highly fossiliferous strata belonging to the Devonian or Carboniferous period; secondly, in proofs of a late small rise of the land; and lastly, in a solitary and superficial patch of yellowish limestone or travertin, which contains numerous impressions of leaves of trees, together with land-shells, not now existing.
But there is absolutely no fossiliferous formation in which the remains of aquatic animals are absent. The oldest fossils in the Silurian rocks are exuviæ of marine animals; and if the view which is entertained by Principal Dawson and Dr.
In the south of Sweden, for example, near Lake Wener, the beds of some of the oldest fossiliferous deposits, called Silurian and Cambrian by geologists, occur in as level a position as if they had recently formed part of the delta of a great river, and been left dry on the retiring of the annual floods.
To this there are two replies: the first that the observational basis of the assertion that the lowest rocks are nowhere fossiliferous is an amazingly small one, seeing how very small an area, in comparison to that of the whole world, has yet been fully searched; the second, that the argument is good for nothing unless the unfossiliferous rocks in question were not only contemporaneous in the geological sense, but synchronous in the chronological sense.
In members of the same class the average amount of change, during long and equal periods of time, may, perhaps, be nearly the same; but as the accumulation of long-enduring fossiliferous formations depends on great masses of sediment having been deposited on areas whilst subsiding, our formations have been almost necessarily accumulated at wide and irregularly intermittent intervals; consequently the amount of organic change exhibited by the fossils embedded in consecutive formations is not equal.
Preliminary Remarks on the Subjects treated of in this Work. Definition of the Terms Recent and Pleistocene. Tabular View of the entire Series of Fossiliferous Strata.
I shall mention one or two examples of alteration on a grand scale, in order to explain to the student the kind of reasoning by which we are led to infer that dense masses of fossiliferous strata have been converted into crystalline rocks.
Above this fossiliferous mass, there is a stratum of very fine-grained, pale brown mudstone, including numerous laminae of selenite. All the strata appear horizontal, but when followed by the eye for a long distance, they are seen to have a small easterly dip. On the surface we have the porphyritic gravel, and on it sand with recent shells.
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