Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. Gosse Philip Henry

exhibits the outer tables of bone broken by a fracture four inches long, near the orbit. The other is more extensive, and behind, being five inches long, and three broad, and over the brain. The inner plate had in both these cases defended the brain from any serious injury, and the animal seems to have been recovering from the latter accident at the time of its death.

39

Naturalist's Voyage, passim.

40

The Indians of North America knew that the Mastodon had a trunk; a fact which (though the anatomist infers it from the bones of the skull) it is difficult to imagine them to be acquainted with, except by tradition from those who had seen the living animal.

41

Ansted; Phys. Geography, 82.

42

An interesting fact relating to the Brazilian caves was communicated to Dr. Mantell. "M. Claussen, in the course of his researches, discovered a cavern, the stalagmite floor of which was entire. On penetrating the sparry crust, he found the usual ossiferous bed; but pressing engagements compelled him to leave the deposit unexplored. After an interval of some years, M. Claussen again visited the cavern, and found the excavation he had made completely filled up with stalagmite, the floor being as entire as on his first entrance. On breaking through this newly-formed incrustation, it was found to be distinctly marked with lines of dark-coloured sediment, alternating with the crystalline stalactite. Reasoning on the probable cause of this appearance, M. Claussen sagaciously concluded that it arose from the alternation of the wet and dry seasons. During the drought of summer, the sand and dust of the parched land were wafted into the caves and fissures, and this earthy layer was covered during the rainy season by stalagmite, from the water that percolated through the limestone, and deposited calc-spar on the floor. The number of alternate layers of spar and sediment tallied with the years that had elapsed since his first visit; and on breaking up the ancient bed of stalagmite, he found the same natural register of the annual variations of the seasons; every layer dug through presented a uniform alternation of sediment and spar; and as the botanist ascertains the age of an ancient dicotyledonous tree from the annual circles of growth, in like manner the geologist attempted to calculate the period that had elapsed since the commencement of these ossiferous deposits of the cave; and although the inference, from want of time and means to conduct the inquiry with precision, can only be accepted as a rough calculation, yet it is interesting to learn that the time indicated by this natural chronometer, since the extinct mammalian forms were interred, amounted to many thousand years." – (Petrifactions and their Teachings, p. 481.)

43

Bibliothèque Univers., March, 1852.

44

"It is now admitted by all competent persons, that the formation even of those strata which are nearest the surface, must have occupied vast periods, probably millions of years, in arriving at their present state." – Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, p. 67.

45

Geology of Central France.

46

"Though perfect knowledge is not possessed, yet there are reasons for believing that the duration of life to testacean individuals of the present race is several years. But who can state the proportion which the average length of life to the individual mollusc or conchifer, bears to the duration appointed by the Creator to the species? Take any one of the six or seven thousand known recent species; let it be a Buccinum, of which 120 species are ascertained, (one of which is the commonly known whelk;) or a Cypræa, comprising about as many, (a well-known species is on almost every mantel-piece, the tiger-cowry;) or an Ostrea (oyster), of which 130 species are described. We have reason to think that the individuals have a natural life of at least six or seven years; but we have no reason to suppose that any one species has died out, since the Adamic creation. May we then, for the sake of an illustrative argument, take the duration of testacean species, one with another, at one thousand times the life of the individual? May we say six thousand years? We are dealing very liberally with our opponents. Yet in examining the vertical evidences of the cessations of the fossil species, marks are found of an entire change in the forms of animal life; we find such cessations and changes to have occurred many times in the thickness of but a few hundred feet of these late-rocks." – Dr. J. Pye Smith, Scripture and Geology, 5th Ed. p. 376.

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"One of the laminated formations [in Auvergne] may be said to furnish a chronometer for itself. It consists of sixty feet of siliceous and calcareous deposits, each as thin as pasteboard, and bearing upon their separating surfaces the stems and seed-vessels of small water-plants in infinite numbers; and countless multitudes of minute shells, resembling some species of our common snail-shells. These layers have been formed with evident regularity, and to each of them we may reasonably assign the term of one season, that is a year. Now thirty of such layers frequently do not exceed one inch in thickness. Let us average them at twenty-five. The thickness of the stratum is at least sixty feet; and thus we gain, for the whole of this formation alone, eighteen thousand years." – Dr. J. P. Smith, Scripture and Geology, 5th Edition, p. 137.

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"This fact has now been verified in almost all parts of the globe, and has led to a conviction that at successive periods of the past the same area of land and water has been inhabited by species of animals and plants as distinct as those which now people the antipodes, or which now co-exist in the arctic, temperate, and tropical zones. It appears that from the remotest periods there has been ever a coming in of new organic forms, and an extinction of those which pre-existed on the earth; some species having endured for a longer, others for a shorter time; but none having ever re-appeared, after once dying out." – Lyell's Elements of Geology, p. 275.