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Updated: June 23, 2025
Finally comes the Anthropozoic or Quaternary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand years, with not much addition to the sedimentary rocks. Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these vast cycles of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the vast weltering sea of lower organic forms.
Where was the highly differentiated Sauropsidan fauna of the Trias in Palaeozoic times? The supposition that the Dinosaurian, Crocodilian, Dicynodontian, and Plesiosaurian types were suddenly created at the end of the Permian epoch may be dismissed, without further consideration, as a monstrous and unwarranted assumption.
Inasmuch as these animals can be proved to have been alive in the Carboniferous epoch, it is perfectly clear that, if the Miltonic account is to be accepted, the huge mass of rocks extending from the middle of the Palaeozoic formations to the uppermost members of the series, must belong to the day which is termed by Milton the sixth.
Then as regards the latter group of rocks in America, the high authority already quoted tells us: "The Upper Helderberg period is eminently the coral reef period of the palaeozoic ages. Many of the rocks abound in coral, and are as truly coral reefs as the modern reefs of the Pacific.
With respect to the terrestrial productions which lived during the Secondary and Palaeozoic periods, it is superfluous to state that our evidence from fossil remains is fragmentary in an extreme degree. For instance, not a land shell is known belonging to either of these vast periods, with one exception discovered by Sir C. Lyell in the carboniferous strata of North America.
Was any form cut off in the world-wide crustal disturbances of the earth at the end of palaeozoic and mesozoic time, when so many forms of animal life appear to have been wiped out, that might in time have given birth to a kind unlike or superior to any now upon the earth? Species after species have become extinct, whole orders and families have gone out, often rather suddenly. Why we know not.
Again, whilst Bain found fossil plants in his reptiliferous strata north of the Cape, and Livingstone and Thornton discovered coal in sandstone, with fossil plants, like those of our old coal of Europe and America, yet both these mesozoic and palaeozoic remains are terrestrial, and are not associated with marine limestones, indicative of those oscillations of the land which are so common in other countries.
I believe this curious floating shell will throw some light on the true nature and habits of several palaeozoic types. It was taken in the towing net, gregarious, in the sea off Cape Howe, the south-east corner of Australia. Tab. 3 fig. 9. a, b. Tab. 2. Helix brumeriensis. Helix franklandiensis. Helix inconspicua. Helix iuloides. Helix divisa. Helix yulei. Helix dunkiensis. Helix louisiadensis.
How do similar reasonings apply to the other great change of life that which took place at the end of the Palaeozoic period?
Tertiary deposits also appear in a less elevated position on the flanks of the Eastern Alps; but in the Central or Swiss Alps, the Palaeozoic and older Mesozoic formations disappear, and the Cretaceous, Oolitic, Liassic, and at some points even the Eocene strata, graduate insensibly into metamorphic rocks, consisting of granular limestone, talc-schist, talcose- gneiss, micaceous schist, and other varieties.
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