Vestiges of the natural history of creation / ... greatly amended by the author ; an introduction by Rev. George B. Cheever. [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / ... greatly amended by the author ; an introduction by Rev. George B. Cheever. [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    served with the utmost fidelity, although for the most part converted into the substance of the enclosing mineral. The rocks may be said thus to form a kind of history of the organic departments of nature from perhaps near its beginning to the present time. This is a piece of know- ledge entirely new to man, and it may be safely said that he has never made a merely intellectual acquisition of a more interesting or remarkable nature. I am to trace this history as well as existing materials will permit. Some difficulty exists with regard to the very first chapter of Fauna’s story. It is as yet undecided at what part of the rock series we have the earliest traces of the life which exists upon our globe. The primary rocks are usually said to be non-fossiliferous—that is, possessing no remains of plants or animals; and it would appear that the first undoubted objects of a fossil kind are the solid parts of polypiaria, crinoidea, Crustacea, and conchifera, found in the Mica Slate and Grauwacke Slate System. These cannot, however, be regarded as for certain the first of earth’s tenants, seeing that “ fragments appa- rently organic, and resembling the cases of infusoria [shelled animalcules]”* have been detected in the pri- mary rocks, and it is very clear that many other simple forms of being, such as the medusae and acalephse, which now swarm in our seas, might have peopled the early ocean, but left no memorial of their slight gelatinous forms in the mud constituting its bottom, particularly as that mud has evidently been afterwards subjected, in its rocky form, to a great degree of heat. So also might the fragile plants of the primary sea fail to come down to us. * Ansted’s Geology, ii., GO.