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Updated: June 16, 2025
"If it comes to the worst," he said to himself, "we need never die of hunger! Here are thousands of dozens of oysters to satisfy the calls of the most imperious stomach! If Tartlet complains, it is because he does not like mollusks! Well, he will have to like them!"
Here a huge boneyard forms from fish, mollusks, and zoophytes dying over it by the billions. The sea is of no great depth at the Grand Banks. A few hundred fathoms at best. But to the south there is a deep, suddenly occurring depression, a 3,000-meter pit. Here the Gulf Stream widens. Its waters come to full bloom. It loses its speed and temperature, but it turns into a sea.
Gradually the antique types of the Paleozoic fauna died out, and in the Permian rocks are found the last survivors of the cystoid, the trilobite, and the eurypterid, and of many long-lived families of brachiopods, mollusks, and other invertebrates. The venerable Orthoceras and the Goniatite linger on through the epoch and into the first period of the succeeding era.
About a sixth part of the whole mass is composed of carbonate of lime, and there is usually an intermixture of fine quartzose and micaceous sand. Although this loam of the Rhine is unsolidified, it usually terminates where it has been undermined by running water in a vertical cliff, from the face of which shells of terrestrial, fresh-water and amphibious mollusks project in relief.
I am on the road to the same results for the mollusks and the articulates, and can even now say in general terms, that the most ancient representatives of all the families belonging to these great groups, strikingly recall the first phases in the embryonic development of their successors in more recent formations, and even that the embryos of comparatively recent families recall families belonging to ancient epochs.
The polypiaria were in such abundance as to form whole strata of themselves. The crinoidea and echinites were also extremely numerous. Shell mollusks, in hundreds of new species, occupied the bottoms of the seas of those ages, while of the swimming shell-fish, ammonites and belemnites, there were also many scores of varieties. The belemnite here calls for some particular notice.
The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe what is otherwise quite probable, that life on our planet began with very small forms that it passed at first through a baby stage. The animals of the Cambrian period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and other simple, primitive types of life.
Each of these nervous masses contains nerve-cells as well as nerve-fibres, and is capable of generating nerve-force. Each, therefore, acts like a minute brain; and, in fact, the entire ganglionic system of nerves is analogous to the nervous system of certain among the lower animals the crustacea and mollusks.
The first beings who initiated a plan for living wrought with their acts the cage in which succeeding generations must be imprisoned. The tranquil mollusks which he now saw in the depths of the waters, clinging to the rocks like dark buttons, seemed to him divine beings who guard the mystery of creation in their stupid quiet.
Animal creation is here on a system of experiments: and they are so endlessly multiplied, and exhibit such a profusion both of deceptive resemblances, and of differences which disappear by transformations, that classification no longer knows which way to turn. Worms, crustaceans, mollusks; to which group do these and those belong?
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