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The silicious particles which constitute this mud, are derived, in part, from the diatomaceous plants and radiolarian animals which throng the surface, and, in part, from the spicula of sponges which live at the bottom.
These silicious bodies belong partly to the lowly vegetable organisms which are called Diatomaceae, and partly to the minute, and extremely simple, animals, termed Radiolaria. It is quite certain that these creatures do not live at the bottom of the ocean, but at its surface where they may be obtained in prodigious numbers by the use of a properly constructed net.
It seemed here to be broken by vertical cracks into large rhomboidal blocks. Further up this creek in a wild and secluded spot, observed a Natural Bridge with six feet of this chert bed at its base, and Silicious Magnesian Limestone above.
And yet that rock is now forming in the midst of a sea which swarms with living beings, the great majority of which are provided with calcareous or silicious shells and skeletons; and, therefore, are such as, up to this time, we should have termed eminently preservable.
Hundreds of chimneys we speak literally are vomiting forth that white, peculiar-looking, and unmistakable vapour called copper-smoke. Enormous masses of that ugly, black, silicious refuse, known in the smelting vocabulary as 'slag, is piled above and around in such quantity as to change even the physical appearance of the country. But this is not all.
Even the denser silicious stones are penetrable by fluids and the coloring matter they contain, to such an extent that agates and other forms of silex may be artificially stained through their substance. The colors of the stones cut at Oberstein are generally produced, or at least heightened, by art.
Hence it follows that these silicious organisms, though they are not heavier than the lightest dust, must have fallen, in some cases, through fifteen thousand feet of water, before they reached their final resting-place on the ocean floor.
One series of these terraced pools and cascades was of the purest white tint, the other of the most delicate pink, the waters topping over the edge of each pool and falling in a miniature cascade to the one next below, thus keeping the edges built up by a continual renewal of the silicious incrustation.
In certain geological formations, the diatomaceae deposit, at the bottom of fresh-water ponds, beds of silicious shields, valuable as a material for a species of very light firebrick, in the manufacture of water-glass and of hydraulic cement, and ultimately, doubtless, in many yet undiscovered industrial processes.
There is no miracle about this matter at all, and science finds no stumbling-block in the way of a complete explication of this riddle, if, in the light of nature, there be any such riddle. We claim there is not, when we interpret nature in the light of nature's God. Let the earth, or rather its silicious and other decaying rocks, bring forth these batrachian forms.
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