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Next anterior in age are the mammalia of the Lower Oolite of Stonesfield, of which four species are known, also very small and probably marsupial, with one exception, the Stereognathus ooliticus, which, according to Professor Owen's conjecture, may have been a hoofed quadruped and placental, though, as we have only half of the lower jaw with teeth, and the molars are unlike any living type, such an opinion is of course hazarded with due caution.
"The soil is oolite and clay, and the subsoil, which you see in the cliffs, is yellow sandstone the loveliest, goldenest soil in the world," declared Estelle. "The colour of a bath sponge," he said, and she pretended despair. "Oh dear! And I really thought I had seen the dawning of poetry in you, Ray." "Merely reflected from yourself, Chicky. Still I'm improving.
He had a geological chart of America, with what he felt to be melancholy blanks for the chalk and oolite beds of his own country, and appropriate fossils indicated by an index-finger in red ink. He had the Poor-Law and electoral systems to master, as well as the prison systems of the different States.
For the formation of such a series implies an area of subsidence, in which its component beds were thrown down. Every area of subsidence is necessarily limited; and to suppose that there exist elsewhere groups of beds completely answering to those known as Oolite, is to suppose that, in contemporaneous areas of subsidence, like processes were going on.
There is no difficulty in obtaining plenty of stone hereabouts. The chief characteristics of the buildings are their antiquity and Gothic quaintness. The air is sharp and bracing, and the climate, as is inevitable on the shallow, porous soil of the oolite hills, wonderfully dry and invigorating.
Pleurotomaria granulata, Sowerby. Ferruginous Oolite, Normandy. Pleurotomaria ornata, Sowerby Sp. Ammonites Humphresianus, Sowerby. Ammonites Braikenridgii, Sowerby. Oolite, Scarborough. Ostrea Marshii. One-half natural size. The extinct genus Pleurotomaria is also a form very common in this division as well as in the Oolitic system generally.
That merely minute, indefinite variations in all directions should unaided have independently built up the shoulder structure of the pterodactyles and carinate birds, and have laterally depressed their optic lobes, at a time so far back as the deposition of the Oolite strata, is a coincidence of the highest improbability; but that an innate power and evolutionary law, aided by the corrective action of "Natural Selection," should have furnished like needs with like aids, is not at all improbable.
About midway of the section on this part of Green River, are limestones of an obscure oolitic structure, but no true oolite was observed.
In 1854 the remains of another mammifer, small in size, but larger than any of those previously known, was brought to light. Portion of a fossil fruit of Podocarya Bucklandi, Ung., magnified. Cone of fossil Araucaria sphaerocarpa, Carruthers. Inferior Oolite. Bruton, Somersetshire. One-third diameter of original. Ostrea acuminata.
The villages in the Vale of Evesham and the Cotswolds afford an excellent illustration of building in harmony with surroundings, and the suitability of making use of local materials. Thus, in the Vale we find mellow old brick, has limestone, half timber and thatch; while on the Cotswolds, oolite freestone and "stone slates" of the same freestone seem the only suitable material.
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