Life, function, health : studies for young men / by H. Sinclair Paterson.

  • Paterson, Hugh Sinclair.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life, function, health : studies for young men / by H. Sinclair Paterson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by University of Bristol Library. The original may be consulted at University of Bristol Library.

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    records of our churchyards and the records of towns are very much ahke, because we bury all our dead in the churchyards. But the records of mud at the estuary of a river or at the bottom of the sea are not parallel with the fauna and flora to be found in the fields and on the mountain-sides from which these layers of mud are drafted. Many forms escape; many organic forms are devoured by other organisms, and in various ways—by the action of the air and otherwise—perish, without leaving any trace behind. I have looked with great care into many treatises to find some light upon it, but it is very hard to say in what circumstances exactly many of these forms have been so preserved to us. It would be apparently easy for us to imagine how a plant or animal might be suddetily embedded in a layer of mud, and after- wards fossilised ; but it is hard to think, on the sup- position that these layers of mud are formed at the slow rate of two or three inches in a century, how fishes, so notoriously perishable, and so apt to be devoured by other denizens of the deep, are pre- served exactly, even to their very scales. I wish I could get more information how these fossils, and especially certain fossils with which many of us are acquainted, have been so thoroughly preserved. In many instances it would seem as if they were over- taken in some great catastrophe. The very writhing of their forms as they lie in the stone tells us of
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