Proceeding with our rapid sketch of the crust of the earth and its uses, we now leave the Lias, to enter upon a survey of the Oolite proper. Overlying the Lias, and underlying the Wealden, we find this deposit, which, though it occupies a comparatively narrow track in our own country, is remarkable for the peculiarity and beauty of its fossils, and for the commercial importance of the rocks of which it is composed. Its name is derived from ōŏn, an egg, and lithos, a stone,^[88] from the remarkable resemblance many of the beds bear to the roe, or eggs of a fish. A good specimen of oolite and the hard roe of a red herring are unlike one another, mostly in the circumstance that one can be cooked, and the other cannot. These egg-like grains are mere agglomerations of calcareous matter, although sometimes a piece of coral, or a broken shell, or a grain of sand, is found to be the nucleus around which these deposits have arranged themselves. It may be as well here to say a word upon the general character of calcareous rocks, which are so largely to engage our attention in this and a subsequent chapter. “This division comprehends those rocks which, like chalk, are composed chiefly of lime and carbonic acid. Shells and corals are also formed of the same elements, with the addition of animal matter. To obtain pure lime it is necessary to calcine these calcareous substances,—that is to say, to expose them to heat of sufficient intensity to drive off the carbonic acid and other volatile matter, without vitrifying or melting the lime itself. White chalk is often pure carbonate of lime; and this rock, although usually in a soft and earthy state, is sometimes sufficiently solid to be used for building, and even passes into a compact stone, or a stone of which the separate parts are so minute as not to be distinguishable from each other by the naked eye.

“Many limestones are made up entirely of minute fragments of shells and corals, or of calcareous sand cemented together. These last might be called ‘calcareous sandstones;’ but that term is more properly applied to a rock in which the grains are partly calcareous and partly siliceous, or to quartz-ore sandstones having a cement of carbonate of lime.

“The variety of limestones called ‘oolite’ is composed of numerous small egg-like grains, resembling the roe of a fish, each of which has usually a small fragment of sand as a nucleus, around which concentric layers of calcareous matter have accumulated.

“Any limestone which is sufficiently hard to take a fine polish is called marble. Many of these are fossiliferous; but statuary marble, which is also called saccharine limestone, as having a texture resembling that of loaf-sugar, is devoid of fossils, and is in many cases a member of the metamorphic series.”^[89] The geographical distribution of this group of rocks may be traced thus:—Commencing with the Bill of Portland, (for there is no isle of Portland,) it runs up through part of Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, part of Lincolnshire, terminating in Yorkshire, where the lias and oolite may be seen lying conformably or in sequence; the zone we have thus indicated being about thirty miles in width. The following tabular arrangement will supplement this by pointing out the divisions and subdivisions of the oolite; on which, however, we do not intend to dwell, as our only object, in this most preliminary treatise,—and we shall be pardoned again intruding this thought upon our readers,—is to assist in the investigation of our standard text-books on this science:—

In the upper oolites, it will be seen, is found the famous Portland stone, in which are some of the most remarkable specimens of the extinct fauna of this remote period. “They are found most plentifully in what is locally designated the ‘dirt-bed’ of Portland—a stratum of dark argillaceous mud, which must at one time have been the soil in which they and other vegetables flourished, but which, by a submergence of the land, was converted into the bottom of an estuary, over which other strata of clay, limestone, and sand were deposited. ‘At the distance of two feet,’ says Bakewell, ‘we find an entire change from marine strata to strata once supporting terrestrial plants; and should any doubt arise respecting the original place and position of these plants, there is, over the lower dirt-bed, a stratum of fresh-water limestone; and upon this a thicker dirt-bed, containing not only the cycadeæ, but stumps of trees from three to seven feet in height, in an erect position, with their roots extending beneath them. Stems of trees are found prostrate upon the same stratum; some of them are from twenty to twenty-five feet in length, and from one to two feet in diameter. The following section of a cliff in Dorset exhibits very clearly proofs of the alternation from marine strata to dry land covered with a forest, and of a subsequent submergence of the dry land under a river or lake which deposited fresh-water limestone.’”

From the well-known quarries in Portland, a description of which would tempt us too far astray, have been procured the materials for St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Reform Club, and other public buildings. A visit to Portland, and examination of the quarries, such as we have twice paid, is well worth the attention of any summer tourist, and will richly repay, in its romantic scenery, and in the unique simplicity of its people’s manners, a week’s quiet stay at the King’s Arms, the once favoured and favourite inn of George the Third.

Then, if we take the middle oolite, we shall find in it the well-known “coral rag,” so called because of the continuous beds of petrified coral found in great abundance, and in many places, apparently, in the same position in which they once grew at the bottom of the sea. We give below a few specimens recently obtained by us from the north of Wiltshire, from which it will be seen how closely they resemble those of existing species.

But what period was that, and what sunny clime was this, when the ocean poured its waves over what are now our oolitic building-stones, and when the coral insect built its continuous reefs in this our England, just as it is now distributing its labours over so vast an expanse of sea in the tropics and the southern hemisphere?^[90] We cannot but recal the poetic and vivid language of Hugh Miller: “Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began!—where has it not been uttered? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless deserts, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand; and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But, once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up, and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals,—shells, and fish, and the stony coral,—that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air, where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys, where the great rivers begin. And yet, once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The effigies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist wreath, and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been,—the devourer of continents—the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the whole land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia, and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie embedded in the great stones of the Pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in the rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists, there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken no more, and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves, every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, ‘when the fountains of the great deep were broken up,’

From this digression we return to our third division of the Oolite proper, the Lower Oolite, as developed in Somersetshire (around Bath), and in Wiltshire (Tisbury, Braford, &c.), which has its own points of interest and of use. Here occurs the fuller’s earth, mostly found at a village near Bath, called Old Down, which possesses the peculiar property of absorbing the grease or oil remaining in cloth, and thus fulling or thickening it. Here also is found that peculiar rubbly limestone, called “Cornbrash,”^[92] in Wiltshire, which, on exposure to atmospheric agencies, soon decomposes, and by mixture with he ordinary constituents of the soil, makes an admirable material in agricultural operations. Here also we have the Bath Oolite, the quarries of which are very extensive, abundant in fossils, and the character of whose stone gives to the city of Bath that clean and aristocratic appearance which is so striking to the stranger approaching Bath from the Great Western Railway.

“In this lower division,” says Lieutenant-Colonel Portlock, “also occurs the Bath oolite, which is an excellent stone for the delicate mouldings of gothic architecture, and is represented in France by the Caen stone, which was imported for the purpose by our early architects, as may be seen in the beautiful Temple Church.”^[93] Of two varieties of Oolite, called “Barnack rag” and “Ketton stone,” obtained from the quarries in Rutlandshire and Northamptonshire, almost all the churches in Cambridgeshire, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are built. As an instance, and illustrative of previous remarks, we may specify King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Whoever has been to the top of that gem of gothic architecture, and walked outside where the stone is weathered, and has been supplemented in various indifferent ways, may there see the ripple marks of the old tides and winds, marking the ebb and flow of pre-Adamite phenomena; and little shells, some of them most tiny ones, but in beautiful preservation, once left in the soft calcareous sand, now embedded in the hard building stone. And here, before we speak of the fossils of the Oolite, we should like to be thoroughly understood about this same ripple-mark, of which we have more than once spoken, and which it seems desirable to explain. “Another structure, often conspicuous in fine-grained sandstones, is that commonly called “ripple-mark.” Either in quarries or natural cliffs, wherever the upper surface of a bed is exposed, it is often found to be not smooth or flat, but waved in small undulations, exactly like those so often seen on a sandy shore. Now, a good deal of misconstruction has, I think, arisen as to the origin of these small undulations or ripples in the sand, leading sometimes to a possibility of grave error in geological reasoning. People standing on the beach, and observing the gentle rippling motion of the waves, and a very similar form in the sand beneath them, have not unnaturally jumped to the conclusion that the one was the cause of the other, that the ripple on the surface of the water had somehow imprinted its form on the sand at the bottom. Now, really, one is not the cause of the other, but they are both caused by the same action, and each is as much a ripple as the other. The wave-like form in the sand is not a ripple mark, but a ripple; if it is the mark of anything, it is a ‘current mark,’ and as such I have always preferred to speak of it. Just as a current in the air produces a ripple in the surface of the water below it, so a current in the water produces a ripple in the sand below it. It makes no difference, indeed, whether the sand be acted upon by air or water. Wherever the circumstances are favourable, wind will cause a ripple or current mark on the surface of blown sand, as I observed frequently under very favourable circumstances at Sandy Cape, in Australia, and as has been observed by Sir Charles Lyell, near Calais. In each case the moving fluid propels the grains of sand forward, piling them up into ridges, which are perpetually advancing by the rolling of particles over the crest of each ridge into the hollow beyond, where they are for a time sheltered from the current, but soon buried under the advancing ridge, to be again turned up and rolled onward, perhaps, as their site becomes exposed to the force of the stream.”^[94]

Other fossil remains found in the Oolite demand our notice before we leave this period of the earth’s history, or this portion of the earth’s crust. In the autumn of last year we were en route to Cornwall, but turned aside to visit, among other matters, the Oolite in the neighbourhood of Bath, Chippenham, Bradford, and Trowbridge. Leaving the trunk line of the Great Western, we transferred ourselves at Chippenham to the branch that would take us to Trowbridge, that little Halifax or Preston of the West of England. Many a long day had passed since we made our first acquaintance with the poet Crabbe, and, though fossil hunting, we felt we must pay a pilgrimage to his honoured shrine. We looked at the old church in which for eighteen years he was the representative and expounder of a large and human creed first uttered by the Great Teacher from Galilee; and standing by Chantrey’s monument of Crabbe, we thought how dear to God the man must be, who by dint of purpose, purity, and hope, had risen from an unknown boy to command the ear of the public in a time of poetic dearth, and who, amidst a very chequered life, had realized the fine idea of Goldsmith:

We have heard it objected to Crabbe’s poetry that it wants fire, that it has no romance, that it moves among the homely scenes of rustic life, and seldom soars above parochial records and village history. But Crabbe’s life was a singularly unromantic one; everything with him had been real, hard, up-hill work, in which he had broken down had he not believed in work rather than in genius. At Bungay School he was flogged unmercifully, according to the wise methods of teaching the classics then in vogue, but now happily exploding, except in our antediluvian public schools; at Bury St. Edmunds he was apprenticed to a surgeon, who quickly turned him into an errand boy and servant of all work; at twenty years of age, conscious of innate power, and aspiring to literary honour, he found himself in London in two equal conditions of misery, without a friend and without a pound; and then, in this very condition of impecuniosity, the tender place of his heart was touched by an unpropertied girl, Sarah Elwy, and he, the friendless young man, loves her with a pure, deep, passionate, and unchanging love. For eight long years of struggle, her image gave buoyancy to his spirit, and oneness to his purpose, amidst the ups and downs of no common hardships,—now turned from the rich man’s door by lacqueys in silver lace, and then politely bowed out by those who might have been his patrons in an hour of need, until, fortune favouring the bold, he became not only the recognised poet of the poor, but better still, the husband of a woman of surpassing worth.

Never aspiring to be a great poet, but only a true and real man, he lived, and laboured, and published much. As a parish clergyman, his memory at Trowbridge is a familiar household word, and having honourably served his generation according to the will of God, he placidly and Christianly fell asleep. As we stood by Chantey’s monumental record of this good man, we felt that it did us good to look on such a memorial of a working man; a working man, in the truest sense of the word, for we must take some care, or else this good name will become an empty conventional sham. We must not confine the term to any one class, whether to men who work with sweat of brow, or to other men who work as hard, and harder too, with sweat of brain; we give the name of working men to all who toil with head or hand, and all such may be bettered by the contemplation of a character like Crabbe’s.

But we return; our digression makes geology lag behind. We were fortunate in procuring several fine specimens of the Crinoidean^[95] or Stone-lily family, about which the reader will pardon a few details. At the stations of the Great Northern Railway, the marble mantelpieces and uprights are all made of the Derbyshire encrinital marble, and the mind is filled with singular surprise in the contemplation of these interesting relics of past creations. How multitudinous must have been this one form of life in those ancient days, and how quietly these encrinites, when their brief term of life was over, must have sunk down into the soft calcareous and argillaceous beds lying at the bottom of the old ocean waiting to receive them, only that, mummy like, it might embalm them safely, until in process of time, by upheaval, evaporation, and sun-hardening, their delicate forms should be brought out to our daylight in all the symmetry and beauty of their pre-Adamite life! But the family of Crinoideans or Stone-lilies, called the “Pear encrinite,” or “apiocrinites rotundus,” differs very remarkably from the “Lily encrinite,” or “encrinites molliformis;” and the following descriptions grouped from Lyell and Buckland, aided by the accompanying figures, will introduce these singular animals to our readers. “The Crinoideans or Stone-lilies are almost all confined to the limestone, but an exception occurs at Bath, where they are enveloped in clay. In this case, however, it appears that the solid upper surface of the ‘Great Oolite’ had supported for a time a thick submarine forest of these beautiful zoophytes, (plant-animals,) until the clear and still water was invaded by a current charged with mud,” (see diagram below, a,) “which threw down the stone-lilies, and broke most of their stems off near the point of attachment. The stumps still remain” (b) “in their original position, but the numerous articulations once composing the stem, arms, and body of the zoophyte, were scattered at random through the argillaceous deposit in which some now lie prostrate. Vast strata of entrochal^[96] marble, extending over large tracts of country in Northern Europe and North America, are made up of the petrified bones of encrinites, just as a cornrick is composed of straws. Man applies it to construct his palace or to adorn his sepulchre, but there are few who know, and fewer still who duly appreciate the surprising fact, that much of this marble is composed of the skeletons of millions of organized beings, once endowed with life, and susceptible of enjoyment, which after performing the part that was for a while assigned to them in living nature, have contributed their remains towards the composition of the mountain masses of the earth.”

That a better idea still may be formed of this zoophyte, let the following diagrams be added: 1 is the body or bulbous head of the pear-encrinite, curiously laminated, and geometrically divided; 2 is a stem the natural size, and 3 a section, or one of the articulations, in which its entrochal and radiated character will appear.

Below is a root of the pear-encrinite (1); this will give some idea how rudely the graceful stems were broken off by the mud sea that came upon them, and how firm a hold the roots of these beautiful zoophytes took of the ocean bottom; many of these roots are covered with serpulæ and coral, that only reveal their beauty under the lens. In the root before us, a little coral insect has begun to reticulate his tiny links of network; these may be seen in 3, magnified, and by comparison with 2, which is a piece of Jamaica coral, found plenteously on the seashore of the north side of the island, the similarity in structure and symmetry will be immediately detected.

We have already spoken of the Ammonite, but we give here a specimen of a rare kind, preserved in the fine clay near Chippenham. The form of this ammonite is more remarkable than that of any other; its delicate nautilus shell has been sadly compressed, and some of its external protuberances have been broken off, and are here restored by dotted lines; but, more striking still, the delicate horn-like structure that terminated its mouth or aperture has been perfectly embalmed by Nature’s kindly hand.

We have no ammonites afloat now: its twin brother, the nautilus, survives still in sunny climes on the tropic seas; and, perhaps, when a “new heaven and a new earth” shall usher in another act in the great drama of creation, the nautilus may be superseded by other forms of molluscous life, to show forth the exhaustless resources of His skill and wisdom, who is “wonderful in counsel and excellent in working.” Thus sings a poet and a geologist:—

Below we add a small group of oolitic shells, not on account of any particular beauty of form attaching to them, but as characteristic of this formation, and as lying conveniently near us for being figured. Their hard names—hard to the mere English reader—may possibly alarm the young, who may at present skip the names: let them get to love the science—let them get into the habit of making nature have a meaning in its realities, and into the settled purpose of determining to know what kind of a world this is in which God has cast their lot, and soon these hard names will be only as finger-posts, directing to certain roads on which they may journey to the end of a happy pilgrimage. Aye, better than any old pilgrimage to a fabulous Holy Sepulchre, will be your pilgrimage to sepulchres wrought by the hand of Infinite Benevolence, for the creatures whom his infinite wisdom had formed, and sustained until he pronounced the decree, “Return!”

Before we quit the Oolite, we have one more stranger to introduce—and in very truth he is the strangest stranger with whom we have yet made acquaintance. We refer to the Pterodactyle.^[97] The geologist, we may suppose, has just lighted on one of these extraordinary remnants of antiquity, say in the Stonefield Quarry, Oxfordshire, and stands aghast as his pick lays open the fragments of this nondescript creature.

But when the researches of science had laid bare the whole of the fossil remains of this heterogeneous creature, when the head and gape of the crocodile, the wing-hands of the bat, and the web-feet of the duck were all revealed; when it was ascertained to be one of those flying reptiles that have no existing type, and that it was “the most extraordinary of all the beings of whose former existence the study of fossils has made us aware,” and “the most unlike anything that exists in the known world;” the blank wonder of the geologist gave way to calm and admiring study, as these undreamt-of relics of the past were made subservient to the wisdom and delight of the present.

The following is Cuvier’s description of this strange creature, borrowed from Ansted, vol. i, p. 418:—

“You see before you,” he says, “an animal which in all points of bony structure, from the teeth to the extremity of the nails, presents the well-known saurian characteristics, and of which one cannot doubt that its integuments and soft parts, its scaly armour, and its organs of circulation and reproduction, were likewise analogous. But it was at the same time an animal provided with the means of flying; and when stationary, its wings were probably folded back like those of a bird, although, perhaps, by the claws attached to its fingers, it might suspend itself from the branches of trees. Its usual position, when not in motion, would be upon its hind feet, resting like a bird, and with its neck set up and curved backwards, to prevent the weight of the enormous head from destroying its equilibrium. Any attempt, however, to picture this strange animal in a living state, would appear to one who has not followed the whole argument to be rather the production of a diseased imagination, than the necessary completion of a sketch of which the main outlines are known to be true. The animal was undoubtedly of the most extraordinary kind, and would appear, if living, the strangest of all creatures. Something approaching to it in form we may perhaps recognise in the fantastic pictures of the Chinese; but art has, in this respect, not been able to rival nature; and the fabled centaur, or dragon, do not present anomalies more strange than those of the species we have been considering.”

This description of Cuvier will recal to the reader’s mind the well-known words of Milton (Par. Lost, Book II. line 247), in which, in his description of an imaginary fiend, he almost realizes to the life the animal whose extinct and fossil remains have been so recently disinterred.

We conclude this chapter by giving drawings of the Pterodactyle. The first is the Pterodactyle as found at Solenhofen; the second is the skeleton restored; and the third the animal itself, according to the best judges of what a portrait of the Pterodactyle would be.