The next division of the secondary rocks is termed the Oolitic system or group. This is a term rather of convenience than of scientific accuracy. In this title it is intended to include the Lias, the Oolite proper, and the Wealden formations. This chapter will be limited to a consideration of the first two series of rocks just named, and in each we shall find abundant material for thoughtful contemplation and intelligent wonder. The English student of geology possesses this great advantage over the student of geology in other lands: this little “corner of Europe,” called England, contains types of almost all the European rocks, and not a few of those that are found in Asia, Africa, and America. To this fact Professor Whewell alluded when he said, “As if nature wished to imitate our geological maps, she has placed in the corner of Europe our island, containing an index series of European formations in full detail.” Out of this circumstance, though little thought of by any except the geologist, arise our threefold sources of wealth. But for the varied distribution of rocks through our country, neither mining, nor manufacturing, nor agricultural operations could be carried on to that extent, and with that success, which have made this country the envy and the admiration of the civilized world. In the warlike age, when Shakspeare wrote, we expect that his praise of England will be on account of her internal security from foreign invasion, and in the hardy prowess of her sons; as when he says, and we are not insensible to the patriotic emotions wakened up by such noble words,—

But, we confess, we rather dwell on other features in our physical and social history, as affording the best proof of our real greatness, and the best illustration of our untiring Anglo-Saxon energy. We would rather record such facts as the following, than announce any “famous victory;” we would rather turn fondly to considerations like these, than contemplate

“Though animal organization is beyond the constructive skill of man, he takes the elements existing in nature, and by new combinations gets new power. He keeps adding to the qualities of his noblest coursers, his fleetest dogs, and his goodliest beeves. He year by year develops the resources of the soil, reclaims the marsh from wild fowl, the heath from rabbits, and the flinty hillside from briars and thistles. He goes on multiplying the blades of grass and grains of corn, and compels an equal area to yield a twofold substance. He discovers in his raw materials unsuspected properties, until soda and sand are converted into a Crystal Palace, and water, coal, and stony ore into a train, which rushes with the might of an earthquake and the velocity of the wind. He devises fresh applications of machinery, and in the creations of his ingenuity finds a servant and a master. The broad result to England is quickly told: fifty years have doubled the population, and employment and subsistence have been doubled likewise. An engine is contrived which economises labour, and threatens starvation to the labourer; but the issue proves that the work it makes is more than it saves. Annihilate all the cranks and wheels constructed in the interval, and return our counties with their present population to the condition in which they were when the century began, and there would be nothing but famine in the land. A government wiser than man’s has provided, in the constant exertion of talent, for the increase of our race, and maintains a proportion between our wants and our progress. Every round we rise in the ladder leads to a higher; but our step is limited, or we should outstrip our needs by too prodigious a stride, and encroach on the rights of a future age.”^[77]

There is no turning over a leaf in the many-paged book of geologic investigation, without finding the frequent application of thoughts like these. Every part of the crust of the earth has its uses, and uses, too, that are peculiar to it; and as we have endeavoured hitherto to point out the economic uses of each formation in the great onward progress of humanity, we shall not find ourselves at a loss in this respect, now that we enter the second division of the secondary rocks.

We commence with the Lias.^[78] During the new red sandstone period, clay and marl were being deposited at the bottom of the seas and lakes then in existence. These were the natural degradations of existing rocks; into these soft deposits sunk various pre-Adamite remains, finding in the soft argillaceous beds ready to receive them the “possession of a burying-place” provided for them by the infinite Creator. Here they remained until in process of time, at the close of the new red sandstone period, these beds and their contents were upheaved from beneath the ocean, apparently without much violence; and becoming hardened by the chemical action of sun and wind, present us with the formation we are now studying, rich in its peculiarly characteristic fossils. The name lias, or layers, indicates the finely stratified condition of the rocks, and affords proof of the tranquil method of their deposit and upheaval. They stretch in a north-easterly direction from Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, where it may be seen on the open coast cliffs for about four miles, on to Whitby, in Yorkshire, where also it lies open to the sea, in cliffs of considerable elevation, and lying conformably with other strata, and is thus particularly favourable to geologistic examination. It is in the shales of the lias at Whitby, and at Lyme Regis, that most of the extraordinary and remarkable fossils have been met with that we are about to describe, and for which this formation is so justly renowned. Indeed, so far as palæontology, or the knowledge of ancient beings, is concerned, there is no formation more full of interest to the student.

Here we meet for the first time with the ammonite. We will introduce him first in his fictitious, and then in his real character, and this we do to show how science dispels the follies of ignorance and superstition. The ammonites were once supposed to be petrified snakes—indeed they are even now called by the ignorant, “snake-stones;” and the pleasant little legend about these snake-stones was this, that St. Hilda, who once resided near Whitby, was very much annoyed, as any matron would be, especially if she kept an establishment for young ladies, as St. Hilda is alleged to have done, by the multitude of snakes that infested the place, and disturbed her equanimity. Accordingly, she set to work, and having first prayed their heads off, then prayed the snakes into stone. In Scott’s “Marmion” the legend reads thus:—

Richardson, in his Geology, relates the “instance of a dealer who having been requested by his customers to supply them with some of the creatures which had escaped decapitation, contrived to manufacture some heads of plaster of Paris, and affixed them to the specimens; thus he pursued a thriving trade, until some remorseless geologist visiting the place, not only beheaded the reptiles, but showed that they were in reality fossil shells.” With the figure of the ammonite every reader of geological books is familiar; it is, perhaps, the best known and most beautiful of all our fossils. We give below a representation of four different kinds, found in the lias and oolite.

In general outline it will be seen that the ammonite somewhat resembles the nautilus, and yet there are characteristic differences that are so striking as to mock the development hypothesis. In the first place, the shell of the ammonite, though of the same flat discoidal form as that of the nautilus, appears to have been much thinner; secondly, it will be seen that the whorls of the ammonite are rounder and more in number than those of the nautilus; and lastly, the siphuncle, of which more presently, runs round the chambers of the ammonite, but through the chambers of the nautilus. Let us look a little at each of these peculiarities; and to aid us, we give below two drawings of sections of ammonites, and two drawings of a nautilus.

The shell of the ammonite is a continued arch, having transverse arches or ribs crossing the main arch, giving to some particular forms of beauty, and to all the peculiar symmetry of a series of spiral curves. But, to compensate for the thinness of the shell, a peculiar adaptation is provided; it consists in the flutings which are seen in the surface, occasioned by the transverse ribs. A pencil-case made of a thin plate of silver is all the stronger for being fluted, and the zinc roof of a railway station is fluted or corrugated, on the same principle. It is thus that strength is combined with economy of material and elegance of form. In the ammonite we see this recent invention anticipated by the Creator, long ages ere man had appeared. In addition to this, those round knobs or bosses studding some of the ammonites (e.g. 1 and 3), like gems upon a diadem, add strength as well as beauty to their frail forms, and thus served the same purpose as the groin work in gothic architecture, a beautiful illustration of which may be seen in the roof of Salisbury Cathedral. Then, looking at the chambers of the shell in the sections, we find that some were for living in, while others were mere empty air-cells, used for purposes of elevation or depression, according as the animal wished to rise to the top or sink to the bottom of the sea,—these front chambers being the drawing-rooms in which the aristocratic ammonite lived. Running round them is an hydraulic instrument, called the siphuncle, or air-tube, by means of which singular mechanism this curious animal altered his specific gravity for purposes of sinking or swimming. “The universal prevalence of such delicate contrivances in the siphuncle, and of such undeviating and systematic union of buoyancy and strength in the air chambers throughout this entire family, are amongst the most prominent instances of order and method that pervade these remains of former races that inhabited the ancient seas; and strange indeed must be the construction of that mind, which can believe that all this order and method can have existed without the direction and agency of some commanding and controlling Mind,”^[79] These are what Cowper finely calls “the unambiguous footsteps of the God;” and in tracing them our minds are elevated into exalted ideas of Him, whose wisdom is unsearchable, and whose ways are past finding out. With regard to the sections of the ammonite, as seen in the two previous figures, dimly indeed compared with the beautiful specimens from which they were copied, we can only add, in the words of the treatise just quoted, “Nothing can be more beautiful than the sinuous windings of these sutures in many species, at their union with the exterior shell, adorning it with a succession of most graceful forms, resembling festoons of foliage and elegant embroidery. When these thin septa are converted into iron pyrites, their edges appear like golden filagree work, meandering amid the pellucid spar that fills the chambers of the shelf.”

We pass by some other fossils found in the lias, such as the pentacrinite, of which we shall speak when we come to other members of the crinoideal family, gryphites,^[80] of which the gryphea incurva is the most common type, broken portions of which, and sometimes good specimens, may be found in most gravel heaps, their peculiar form having obtained for them the name among the rustics of “devil’s toe-nails;” and belemnites,^[81] often met with in vast numbers, and known under the name of ladies’ fingers, and thunderbolts; and fossil fish, a few specimens of which are found in the lias.

Passing by these, we next notice the huge Saurians,^[82] by far the most wondrous vertebrated animals with which either the ancient or modern vestiges of creation have made us acquainted. These saurians, sometimes called Enaliosaurians, (enalios, the sea, and sauros, a lizard,) on account of their peculiar habitat, may all be included in Milton’s description of the leviathan, though it is hard to tell what precise creature our great poet had in his “mind’s eye” at the time of writing this description—one line of which, from having a syllable too much, reads most unrhythmically—for the crocodile does not go so far out to sea as he represents, and if he did, would be hardly likely to go on to the “Norway foam;” nor can he mean the whale, for the whale has no “scaly rind:”—

But before we enter on a description of these extinct and anomalous creatures, we shall give a sketch of both. No. 1 is the skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus,^[83] restored from the fragments found chiefly at Lyme Regis: it may be seen, with several of its congeners and contemporaries, in the British Museum. No. 2 is a restored outline of this saurian; from both of which sketches it will be seen that the most justly dreaded monsters of our tropical climates sink into insignificance beside the ancient tenants of the mighty deep, in those remote periods of geological antiquity we are now contemplating. The combination of the forms of the fish and the lizard seems more like a troubled dream of Fuseli, than the calm and philosophic deductions of the most eminent anatomists and philosophers.

The fossil remains of this creature show that it was intended chiefly, if not entirely, for a marine life. Like the seal, it may occasionally have come to bask on the shore, although, like the seal, it possessed no developed legs or feet, but only paddles. The size of these animals was enormous; they sometimes attained a length of upwards of thirty feet; and to realize such a creature, we must imagine our meeting with a monster thus long in some tropical swamp, having a smooth slimy skin like a whale, a long heavy head like a porpoise, teeth like a crocodile, vertebræ hollow, and therefore light, like the vertebræ of a fish, enabling it to dive swiftly to the bottom, and equally as swift to rise again; and paddles like a whale. Again, look at the head,—that is, go into room No. 4 of the British Museum, and look with wonder, as we often have, on Wall-case A(1), and B(2), and C(3), and you will agree with us that the half of the wonders of this heteroclite^[84] creature have not been told. It had a gape, that is, it could open its jaws seven feet, so that a grenadier guard might walk into his mouth without stooping; it had teeth, not placed in sockets, but arranged in a long continuous trough; it had an eye more marvellous than the eye of the Ancient Mariner, that kept the wedding guest sitting on a stone, who could do nought but hear, for the eye of the Ichthyosaur was often eighteen inches in diameter, so that a man might put his head, hat and all, into its socket,—and this eye was possessed of more wondrous properties than even the eye of the celebrated Irishman that could see round a corner, for the eye of the Ichthyosaur enabled its owner to see all round the country at one time; and as it was a very predatory animal, having doubtless as many enemies as victims, it required this eye both day and night, and accordingly the eye was placed close to the nose, so that the animal could not come to the surface of the water to breathe without being immediately forewarned of danger, or advised of a prize.^[85]

Next follows the Plesiosaurus,^[86] which may be seen, in its skeleton parts, restored, and in casts, in room No. 3 of the British Museum, in Wall-cases D(4), E(5), F(6). “The beautiful state of preservation of many of the Plesiosauri, the entire skeleton, from the point of the muzzle to the extremity of the tail, lying in relief, as if it had sunk down quietly on the soft clay, and become petrified on the spot, manifests how different were the conditions in which the strata of the lias and the wealden were deposited; while the exquisite manner in which the investing stone has been removed, attests the consummate skill and indefatigable zeal of the gentleman (Mr. Hawkins) by whom these superb fossils were developed.”^[87]

Below, No. 1, is a skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, and No. 2 is the restored outline of the animal, whose largest specimen never exceeded seventeen feet.

Cuvier thus describes the Plesiosaur (we borrow the quotation from Buckland):—

“The Plesiosaur is the most heteroclite, and in character the most monstrous, of all the animals that have yet been found amid the ruins of a former world. To the head of a lizard it united the teeth of a crocodile, a neck of enormous length resembling the body of a serpent, a trunk and tail like that of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a whale. Such are the strange combinations of form and structure of the Plesiosaurus, a genus the remains of which, after interment for thousands of years amidst the wreck of millions of extinct inhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recalled to light by the researches of the geologist, and submitted to our examination in nearly as perfect a state as the bones of species that are now existing on the earth.”

We add a word upon the uses of this portion of the crust of the earth, and we do so in the striking words of Hugh Miller. “We have seen how this central district of England has its storehouses of coal, iron, salt, lime,—liberal donations to the wants of the human animal, from the carboniferous, saliferous, and silurian systems; and to this we must now add its inexhaustible deposits of medicine, contributions to the general stock by the oolitic system. Along the course of the lias medicinal springs abound: there is no other part of England where they rise so thickly, or of a quality that exerts a more powerful influence on the human frame. The mineral waters of Cheltenham, for instance, so celebrated for their virtues, are of the number; and the way in which they are elaborated in such vast quantities seems to be as follows:—They all rise in the lias, a formation abounding in sulphate of iron, lime, magnesia, lignite, and various bituminous matters; but they all have their origin in the saliferous marls of the upper new red sandstone which the lias overlies. In the inferior formation they are simply brine springs, but brine is a powerful solvent. Passing through the lias, it acts upon the sulphur and the iron—becomes, by means of the acid thus set free and incorporated with it, a more powerful solvent still—operates upon the lime, upon the magnesia, upon the various lignites and bitumens—and at length rises to the surface, a brine-digested extract of liassic minerals. The several springs yield various analyses, according to the various rocks of the upper formation through which they pass; some containing more, some less lime, sulphur, iron, magnesia, but in all the dissolving menstruum is the same. And such, it would appear, is the mode in which Nature prepares her simples in this rich district, and keeps her medicine-chest ever full.”

Thus wondrous is the machinery of God’s universe; every day utters some fresh speech, and every night shows forth some new knowledge.

Note.—We do not like to close this chapter without mentioning the name of Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis. It is mainly to her practical talent and perseverance that we owe these relics of past ages found in the lias: the history of the British Museum will have to record this humble name, as well as that of Sir Hans Sloane, its founder. The following we borrow from Miss Zornlin’s “Recreations in Geology,” p. 197—

“Mary Anning died in 1847. Her father, by trade a carpenter, was in his own neighbourhood one of the first collectors of coorosities, as they are locally termed, such as petrified ladies’ fingers and turbots (as the fish were termed), verterbarries (vertebræ), cornemonius (ammonites), and crocodiles’ jaws (ichthyosauri), &c. He died when his daughter Mary was about ten or eleven years old; and the circumstances of the family being straitened, she went down one day to the beach to search for ‘coorosities.’ She found a fine specimen of an ammonite; and as she was coming home, a lady who met her in the street offered her half-a-crown for the fossil in her hand. Mary Anning’s future destiny was sealed. She prosecuted her searches ‘on beach,’ and in the following year (1811) observed among the ledges of the rocks a projecting bone of some animal. This enterprising girl (then only eleven years old) traced the fossil in the cliff, and hired some men to dig it out. It proved to be the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus, and has for many years formed an object of interest in the British Museum. Mary Anning afterwards sold this specimen for about 23l.”

To this we add, that in the “Memoirs of Ichthyosauri,” by Thomas Hawkins, Esq. reference is made to Miss Anning, as one “who devoted herself to science, and explored the frowning and precipitous cliffs, when the furious spring-tide conspired with the howling tempest to overthrow them, and rescued from the devouring ocean, sometimes at the peril of her life, the few specimens which originated all the facts and ingenious theories of those eminent persons, whose names must ever be remembered with sentiments of the liveliest gratitude.”