SKETCHES IN GEOLOGY.

West Coast Times, Issue 636, 8 October 1867, Page 4

SKETCHES IN GEOLOGY.

Lectube delivered by Ma South, at the Coubt House, on the 12th Sept., 1867, In aid of the Funds for forming a Library in connection with the Hokitika Literary Society. [conclusion.] Section IV. With reference to the organic remains of ancient plants and animals in the secondary and tertiary series of these strata, the manner of their distribution in the Earthy and the periods of their existence and destructbn, it would be manifestly impossible in a Lecture like this to give more than a cursory sketch of. The researches of modem naturalists and geologists have brought to light a vast number of these remains of organic fossils, so much so that in some departments they absolutely exceed the living ranks of creation ! A new edition which, in 1855, was passing .through the press, was expected to contain 10,000 species, which, in 1833, had been 1500, and in 1843, 5000, and these are exclusive of nearly an equal number winch adorn the continental cabinets. | In the face of the discoveries -which G-eo-logy has brought to light, the question need not be asked whether the Earth we inhabit has ever been in any other condition than that in which we now see it. Modern Geology enables us to ascertain what are the stages through which it has passed, and what was its first 6tate. As we have already seen, the first insight which we obtain into tho early condition of the Earth, gives us that of an oblong ball, fluid with intense heat (whether composed of matter of which the Sun may have formed the original nucleus or source, as supposed, it is impossible to determine) turning on its own axis and revolving round the Sun. Ages, no doubt, elapsed before the surface became cooled and hardened and capable of sustaining organised existences. The water which encircles a large portion of this Grlobe must for ages have existed only in the shape of steam, enveloping the planet in one thick curtain of mist. When the cooling of the surface allowed it to condense and descend, then the lowest stratified rocks were formed. The water in the shape of rains and rivers now acted by their force so as to grind parts of the matter to sand, and carry it down to the depths and cavities. In the beds overlying these primitive formations, in which life was not, we have a vast assemblage of strata of various kinds, as "we have seen ; but which are many thousands of feet thick, and abounding iv remains of animal life. These consist exclusively, however, of marine animals, and with them seaweed like plants ; the lowest of the vegetable tribe, probably the first in the world, certainly the first which have been discovered. In the upper strata of this system has been discovered the origin of the race of fishes. These, ,at that period, were huge monsters clothed in mail, "who," as an eminent geologist has said, " must have been the terror of the Beas they inhabited, have left (.heir indestructible coats hehind them as evidence of their existence." Atjove these gome the carboniferous strata containing the remain's o£'a gigantic and luxuriant vegetation, where al6O reptiles and insects begin to make their appearance. In the next, or secondary period, appear gigantic animals, half toad,' half lizard, who hopped about, leaving often their footprints like those of a clumsy human haud upon the sandy shores of the seas they have inhabited, and the bones of other monsters (called the Sauriana or those of the Lizard tribe) whose bones have been collected in vast numbers. Even the air had its tenantry from the same family type. The Pterodactyls (or flying lizarJs) were creatures half lizards, half vampyre, provided with one elongated wing finger, j enabling them to fly. Lyell says that one | found in the Kentish chalk was of gigantic | dimensions," measuring sixteen feet six inches from tip to tip of its outstretched wings. In I an early stage of this period traces of birds appear, and somewhat later those of mammals, but of the lowest class of that division, viz., the marsupial, or pouch bearing animals. The feathered giants of New Zealand, as Lyell terms them, belong to an era prior to the human race, and to a post-tertiary period, and, as Dr. F. Hochstetter, the geologist, hos observed — " It is a remarkably iueomprehen- j sible fact of the creation, thafc whilst at the J very same period in the Old World, gigantic j elephants, rhiuocerous, hoppopotami ; in South America, huge sloths and armadillos ; j in Australia, gigantic kangaroos, wombats, and dasgures, were 1 ving. t lie 'colossal for;ns of animal life ware represented in New Zealand \ by gigantic birds, who walked the shores then untrod by the foot of any living thing." Dr. j Hoobstetter with pleasure acknowledges the j zeal and exertions of his friend and country- j man, Dr. Haast, in adding valuable sneei- j mens to the collections of the Uovara expedi- j tion. The observations of Haast made during this search threw a new light upon tbis great family of extinct birds. He found that, according to the depth, so was the size of the remains, thus proving that tho greater the antiquity the larger the specie 3. The bodies of dinorvis crassus and Falapterix ingnes (a bird standing the height of nine feet) were always found at a lower level than the bone 9of dinomis didifor,nis of Professor Owen) of only four feet high. Certain casts taken of large birds from the Connecticut red sandstone far I exceed those of any living ostrich, and show ! that some of these fossil bipeds had feet four times as large as the ostrich, but not larger than the dinorvis. The eggpf the JEpiornis (a gigantic bird recently discovered in an alluvial deposit in Madagascar) has six times the capacity of that of the ostrich : but Professor Owen doc 3 not believe that this JEfeiornis exceeded, if indeed it equalled the stature of tho dinornlt, whose head stood nearly twenty feet from the ground, and was equal in size to six ostriches. Lastly comes the Tertiary period in which mammalia of the highest forms appear, and for long ages existed : while the Earth was the abode principally of mastodons, huge elephants, rhinoceroses, many of them of colossal proportions, and of species which have now passed away. Many remains of these animals have been found in the frozen rivers of the north, where they could scarcely have lived ; one of the proofs of the many and vast changes age after age takes place. During this era the ox, horse, and deer, destined by the Giver of all good to be serviceable to man, made their appearance, and, lastly, man became an inhabitant of the Earth, whose existence on Earth, it is clear, has been brief (geologically speaking) compared with the countless ages during' which the unreasoning creatures were sole possessors of the Globe. To attempt a description of these stupendous antediluvian fossil animals would bo far beyoncKny means of research here. Suffice it to say, that the mammoth has been ascertained, without a shadow of doubt, to have been a most powerful brute, and of colossal : size, the skeleton of one found being thirtrytwo feet long, and fifteen feet high, with tusks ten feet long, and fifteen inches in the head. The old shell of the ammonite i (four feet wide) has been ibnud between two i ;bands of limestone in the Irish Sea. The' Ignanodon bones have been found under' the Tilgatei Forest. His size was enor-: mous, the bodies of the largest elephants were J not equal to his, and his tail, Jike that of the ; crocodile, was large and stretched out to the ' length of twenty feet, whilst his back was six- 1 teen feet high. The Glyptodon casing, and' Mylodon, and colossal Megatherium bones, I are undqr ,&e } G?-eat Pampas W South America. Tbs^(KS,ih«rium body i«, with Khoa-I

sands of others, in the Paris basin. The bones of the Dinothcrium were in tho Middle Rhine Valley, until Professor Knap dug them up. Mo3t of these old places have been se»-en times at tho bottom of the sea, and as often dry land. Wo may, therefore, with certainty aiiticipate the time when the centre of tho Pacific Ocean shall be the site of a city ; and "when men shall dig the foundations of their houses, and sink their wells, they shall behold witli wonder the fossil remains of a world which the human eye hath never yet actually seen, and only few men have conjectured shall be there. It is to the great Cuvier thai, modern Creology is indebted for many of these discoveries. For though often only scattered fragments were brought to light, he was able to reconstruct the whole animal, and present him to our view. The quarries around Paris had fnrnished a vast number of bones of strange animals, and these were thrown promiscuously into the collections of that city. Well prepared by previous study, thi3 distinguished anatomist went amongst them with the enquiry — can these hones live 1 "I found myself," says he, "a3 if placed in a charnel house, surrounded by mutilated fragments of many hundred skeletons of more than twenty kinds of animnls, piled confusedly around me. The task assigned me was to restore them all to their original position." At the voice of comparative anatomy, every bone and fragment of a bone resumed its place. It is hardly necessary to say that, since this first successful experiment, the same principles have been more thoroughly investigated, and extended with the same success into every department of fossil organic nature. The results which have crowned the labors of such men as Agazziz, Ehrenberg, Kamp, Groldfuss, Bronn, Blainville, Bronguiart, Deshayes, and D'Orbigny, on the Continent oi'Europe; and of Conybeare, Buddand, Mantell, Lindley, and Hutton,andeminentlyofOweninEngland,with a host of others; although sustained by the most rigid principles of science, are, nevertheless, but little short of miraculous, and they demonstrate most clearly the identity of anatomical laws, in all ages among animals and plants of every size and character, from the lofty lepidodendra to the humblest moss or seaweed, and from the gigantic dinotherium, mastodon, megatherium, and ignanodon to the smallest and almost imperceptible infusoria. A bone of the Labyrinthodon, or of the great wingless bird, -will indicate the size and structure of an animal that lived millions of ages ago, as perfectly as tho bones of the horse, cow, or lion, indicate the existing classes of animals, and from the structure wo infer the habits and instincts of the animal ; eau determine whether it was herbivorous or carnivorous, and the conditions under which it lived and died, with the same certainty as though wo had witnessed its life and habits, as we now study the character of existing races. How pre-eminent amongst the 184.. geologists of tho present time stood the lamented Hugh Miller, the working man, the Christian geologist, who, looking up from Nature to Nature's God, lived in a world of his own, until his life paid the forfeit of his mental researches, but who lived long enough to be elected, by a unanimous vote, to bo one of tho Presidents of the Eoyitl Physical Society. What » proud position did Hugh Miller, the working man, occupy, and doos he not now live in the hearts of all the scientific men of Europe. Hear this description of his first fossil discovery. " Our employer, on quitting the quarry for tho building on which we were to bo engaged, gave all the workmen a half holiday. I employed it in visiting the place. I found it was. composed of thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substiauce. Ihe layers into which the beds readily separate are hardly an eighth part of an inch in>thickncsS, and yet on every layer there are the impressions of thousands and tens of thousands of the various fossils peculiar to the lias. We may turn over the wonderful leaves one afi er one, like the leaves of a Herbarium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every page. Scallops and Gryphites, and Ammonites, of almost every variety peculiar to the formation, and at least some eight or ten vai'ieties of the Belemnite. When the first, year of his labor came to a close, he found thafc the amount of his happiness had not been less than in the last of his boyhood, and that, us his knowledge increased, and his conviction that tho great bulk of mankind must pass their days in labor, it hadj. not inclined him to skepticism." -"" Besides tho rocks, there are other substances, especially ico and peat, which often preserve animals for an immense time. A few years ago a poor Tungusian fisherman, whilst pursuing hi 3 occupation on the sand, found the body of a mastodon embedded in the ice, whew it had been entombed for thousands of years; it was unlike any similar animal of this age, and belonged to a race quite extinct; yet, after so many ages had past over it, there it was with the hair and skin upon it, and the flesh so perfect, that the dogs, wolves, and boars fed upon it for mouths. Peat also has a great preservative power, and bodies buried or sunk in it may remain for ages without undergoing decomposition. In this way the bones of the huge Irish Elk, and other animals, have been preserved, and are found almost as perfect as when the animal died. A magnificent skeleton of the Fossil Elk of Ireland, now in the Museum of the Dublin Royal Society, was taken out of a deposit of shell marl, covered by a layer of peat, and resting on clay. It measured thus : Ft. In. Length of spine . . '. . 10 10 Height to top of the back . 6 6 Ditto to the highest point of tip of tho horn .... 10 4 Distance between the tips of the horns 11 10 The manner in which bones have been pregerved in caves of limestone rocks, I desire to call attention. These caves are of frequent occuiTence. Tho mouth of that of which I speak had been covered with rubbish and rock to the depth of about forty feet, -when some miners accidentally cut their way into it. It was situated in the older portion of the oolite formation, and consisted of an irregular narrow passage, extending 250 feet into the hill. There are a few expansions in it, but scarcely high enough for a man to stand upright. The sides and floor were found covered with a deposit of stalagmite (or lime deposit), beneath which there was a bed of from two to tlireo feet of fine sandy and micaceous (i.e. granited) loam, the lower portion of which in particular contained an innumerable quantity of bones, the greater part of which were well preserved. The animals to which they belonged were extinct species, and indicate a class of animals inhabiting the district which have long since passed away. Yet, although thousands of years have' gone by since this cave "was made a den of these monsters, so great is the care ■which nature has taken of these relics, that they are brought again to the light of day, j the bones of the flesh eater and his victim together, the one slill retaining the marks left by the teeth of the other that gnawed them. At a time when no human being was in England, where London now stands there was a bed of plastic clay. In the tertiary age, when the island was not of the same shape or size as it is at present, the animals inhabiting England wero very similar to those which ape in India now ; then hundreds of elephants wandered over the plains, and there was the huge two-horned but now fossil rhinoceros. During the time when England bad a tropical climate, which, from the remains of its vegetable production* , Jim i»pu r^duoed to fkffit-

tainty, one scarcely knows which, most excites the wonder, the individual beauty and contrast of forms, or that vigour and freshness of vegetable life which characterises the climate of 'he tropics (101 b period, newer tertiary). When we take this view of such stupendous changes in this our limited human abode, .-is G-cology has opened, and still continues to open lo our view, and feel that it is only a part of one great system, that is every day increasing its results under the all-seeing eye of our Great Parent the Deity ; our spirit awed, but exalted by love, is ready to exclaim, ' Say unto God, O how wonderful art thou in thy 'works: through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies be found liars unto thee."