Trench, in his charming little book on the “Study of Words,” says of words that they are “fossil poetry.” He adds, “Just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or finely vertebrated lizard, such as now it may be, have been extinct for many thousands of years, are permanently bound up in the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would otherwise have been theirs; so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished—these, which would so easily have perished too, are preserved and made safe for ever.”

Geology is the fossil poetry of the earth; such a poetry as those can never dream of who in a pebble see a pebble and nothing more. But to those who walk through this great and beautiful world intent upon finding material for thought and reflection, there is no “picking up a pebble by the wayside without finding all nature in connexion with it;” and the most retired student, in search not simply of the picturesque or of the beautiful, but of anything and everything that can minister to his profounder worship of Him to whom belongeth both “the deep places of the earth and the strength of the hills,” may say of his solitary rambles:—

We now enter upon the ancient life, or Palæozoic period of the earth’s history, and proceed to examine the oldest forms of life, or the most ancient organic remains found in the crust of the earth. As we do not aim to teach geology in this small work, but simply to place the chief geological facts in such a light as to impart a taste for the science, the reader will not expect any minute details, which are more likely to perplex than to assist the beginner. Let the reader dismiss from his mind all that he has tried to remember about Upper and Lower Silurian rocks, and the Upper and Lower Ludlow rocks, the Caradoc sandstone and the Llandilo flags, and so on; let us simply say that one part of the crust of the earth, supposed to be between 50,000 and 60,000 feet in thickness,^[28] is called the Silurian system, and constitutes a large and interesting part of the Palæozoic period. The term Silurian was given to this part of the earth’s crust in consequence of these rocks being found chiefly in Wales, Devon, and Cornwall—parts of England once inhabited by the Silures, who under Caractacus made so noble a stand against the Romans.

In coming for the first time into contact with the organic remains of pre-Adamite creations, it may be well to entreat the student to mark, as he goes on, the very different and characteristic fossils of the several formations through which we propose to travel. There will be little or no difficulty in doing this, and its mastery will be of invaluable service in our after researches. There is and there can be no royal road to any kind of learning; all, therefore, that we propose to do is to take a few of the big stones, boulders, &c., that have needlessly been allowed to make the road rougher than necessary, out of the way, that thus our companion traveller on this geologic route may feel that every step of ground walked over is a real and solid acquisition. In marking the characteristic fossils of each formation, let us suggest, in passing, the vast amount of pleasure there is in going to a friend’s house, and looking at the minerals or organic remains that may be in the cabinet or on the mantel-shelf, and being able to take them up one by one, and to say this is from the Silurian; that is from the Carboniferous; this is from the Cretaceous, and that from the Wealden formations, and so on. Why, it gives a magical feeling of delightful interest to every object we see, and will always make a person a welcome visitor with friends with whom, instead of talking scandal, he can talk geology. Not long since the writer had a very pleasing illustration of this. He had been lecturing on geology in a small agricultural village; there was a good sprinkling of smock-frocks among the hearers, and he said at the close of one of the lectures, “Now, very likely most of you have got some stones, as you call them, at home on the chimneypiece; perhaps you don’t know their names, or what they were before they became stones; well, bring them next week, and we will do our best to name them for you!” Next week, after the lecture, up came one, and then another, and then a third, and so on; and diving their hands down into the old orthodox agricultural pocket, brought out a variety of specimens, some of them very good indeed, which had been “picked up” by them in the course of their labour, and which, supposed to be “rather kūrŭss,” had been carefully conveyed home. When these matters were given a “local habitation and a name,” the delight of many was most gratifying.

Now, all this is only just the application of M. Cousin’s words in relation to physical geography: “Give me the map of a country, its configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and all its physical geography; give me its natural productions, its flora and fauna, and I pledge myself to tell you à priori what the inhabitants of that country will be, and what place that country will take in history, not accidentally, but necessarily; not at a particular epoch, but at all periods of time; in a word, the thought that country is formed to represent.”

These remarks furnish us with a clue. Each formation has its own peculiar and characteristic fossils, and these fossils are arranged with as much care, and preserved as uninjured, as if they had been arranged for a first-class museum. But before proceeding on this fossiliferous tour, we may anticipate a question that may possibly be asked on the threshold of our inquiries, and into which we propose going fully in the sequel of this volume. It may be asked, “Were not these fossils placed in the rocks by the Deluge?” To this, at present, we answer, that so partial and limited was the character of the Deluge, being confined to just so much of the earth as was inhabited by man, and so brief was its duration, compared with the vast geological epochs we shall have to consider, that we do not believe we have one single fossil that can be referred to the Noachian deluge; and before we close, we trust it will have been made evident to every careful reader that fossils, as records of Noah’s flood, are an impossibility; and that the vast antiquity of the globe, taken into connexion with the prevalence of death on a most extensive scale, ages and ages previous to the creation of man, can alone account for our innumerable treasures of the “deep places of the earth.”

The characteristic fossils of the Silurian system are entirely unique. The trilobite may fairly be regarded as the prominent one; besides which there are orthoceratites, and graptolites, some members of the crinoidean family, with different kinds of corallines, and some other names to be rendered familiar only by future further study. We shall confine ourselves to those that our own recent researches have made us familiar with. First, here is the trilobite. We need not perplex our readers by any of the numerous subdivisions of this remarkable animal’s nomenclature; that would defeat the purpose of this book. Any work on geology will do this.^[29] Here are three trilobites: one (1) by itself; another, (2) imperfect in its bed or matrix, and a third (3) rolled up.

This most remarkable crustacean possessed the power of rolling itself up like the wood-louse or the hedgehog; and, reasoning by analogy, we suppose this to have been its defence against its numerous enemies. It is a very abundant fossil, found all over Europe, in some parts of America, at the Cape of Good Hope, but never in more recent strata than the Silurian. The hinder part of the body is covered with a crescent-like shield, composed of segments like the joints of a lobster’s tail; and two furrows divide it into three lobes, whence its name.^[30] Most remarkable are the eyes of this animal, and it is the only specimen in the vestiges of ancient creations in which the eye, that most delicate organization, is preserved; and if, as we believe, this little creature was living and swimming about, now and then fighting with some greater Cephalopodous mollusk, millions and millions of years ago, then in this fact we have the real fossil poetry of science, the romance of an ancient world which geology reveals to our delighted and astonished minds. From Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise we give a drawing of the eyes of the trilobite; and in Buckland’s words we add: “This point deserves peculiar consideration, as it affords the most ancient, and almost the only example yet found in the fossil world, of the preservation of parts so delicate as the visual organs of animals that ceased to live many thousands, and perhaps millions of years ago. We must regard these organs with feelings of no ordinary kind, when we recollect we have before us the identical instruments of vision through which the light of heaven was admitted to the sensorium of some of the first created inhabitants of our planet.”^[31]

But these are not the only fossils, or organic remains, to be found in the clay, slates, &c., of the Silurian system. Passing by those we have briefly indicated above, there are others of a highly interesting character, concerning some of which we proceed to give a brief history. Being in Cornwall a short time since, we made a visit to Polperro, a romantic but out-of-the-way town on the south-west coast, for the purpose of procuring some remains of fossil fish considered characteristic of the Silurian system of Murchison, and which have been recently discovered by Mr. Couch, an eminent local naturalist, in the cliffs east and west of that town. We did not see Mr. Couch, but found our way to a coast-guardsman, also a naturalist, whom we found to be a most skilful bird and fish stuffer, and a ranger for objects of natural history among the surrounding clay-slates and other rocks. William Loughrin’s collection of Cornish curiosities will well repay any traveller going out of the way twenty or thirty miles, and they will find in him a fine specimen of an intelligent and noble class of men. Below we give some specimens from the Polperro slate. No. 1 might be taken for impressions of sea-weed, so remarkably does it resemble the sea-weed thrown up on our beaches; but it is generally conceded that this is merely a crystallization of oxydized matter, such as may often be found in connexion with manganese.

No. 2 is the Bellerophon,^[32] a shell which we shall afterwards find in the mountain limestone, but which is rare in connexion with the Silurian rocks.

No. 3 we know not how to describe. We are not certain what organic remains these are; so far as we have been able to examine them, they appear to us the remains of succulent vegetables, (?) probably the thick, soft stems of sea-weed, that may once have reposed in quiescence on the mud of which these slates are composed, and afterwards have been crushed by the superposition of mud and shale, until in the course of ages, by upheaval and depression, they have become a second time visitants of our atmosphere, and now expose themselves to our study and speculations.

Here is one more form of life of this ancient period; it is evidently a coralline, which we also procured at Polperro.

Let us suppose our readers to have made themselves familiar with these organic remains, simply as characteristic and illustrative of this formation; they will easily find their way into other traces and remnants of ancient life in the Silurian epoch. How absurd must seem the development hypothesis to those who rightly ponder these old, old vestiges! It seems to us a very idle idea to suppose that a trilobite could develop itself into a bird, or a monkey, or by any series of happy accidents, could become a man;^[33] yet such has been the theory of those who overlook what some writer on geology, whose name we forget, has expressed strongly in these words: “There is no fact which has been demonstrated more completely to the satisfaction of every man of real science, than that there is no known power in nature capable of creating a new species of animal, or of transmuting one species into another.”

We close this chapter on the Silurian system in the eloquent words of Professor Sedgwick: “The elevation of the faunas of successive periods was not made by transmutation, but by creative additions, and it is by watching these additions that we get some insight into nature’s true historical progress. Judging by our evidence—and what else have we to judge by?—there was a time when Cephalopods were the highest type of animal life. They were then the Primates of this world, and, corresponding to their office and position, some of them were of noble structure and gigantic size. But these creatures were degraded from their rank at the head of Nature, and Fishes next took the lead; and they did not rise up in nature in some degenerate form, as if they were only the transmuted progeny of the Cephalopods, but they started into life in the very highest ichthyic type ever reached.

“Following our history chronologically, Reptiles next took the lead, and, with some evanescent exceptions, they flourished during the countless ages of the secondary period as the lords and despots of the world: and they had an organic perfection corresponding to their exalted rank in Nature’s kingdom; for their highest orders were not merely great in strength and stature, but were anatomically raised far above any forms of the Reptile class now living in the earth. This class, however, was in its turn to lose its rank. Mammals were added next (near the commencement of the tertiary period), and seem to have been added suddenly. Some of the early extinct forms of this class, which we now know only by ransacking the ancient catacombs of Nature, were powerful and gigantic, and we believe well fitted for the place they filled. But they in turn were to be degraded from their place in Nature, and she became what she now is by the addition of man. By this last addition she became more exalted than before. Man stands by himself, the despotic lord of the living world; not so great in organic strength as many of the despots that went before him in Nature’s chronicle, but raised far above them all by a higher development of brain, by a framework that fits him for the operations of mechanical skill, by superadded reason, by a social instinct of combinations, by a prescience that leads him to act prospectively, by a conscience that makes him amenable to law, by conceptions that transcend the narrow limits of his vision, by hopes that have no full fruition here, by an inborn capacity of rising from individual facts to the apprehension of general laws, by a conception of a cause for all the phenomena of sense, and lastly, by a consequent belief in the God of nature:—such is the history of nature.”^[34]