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Title: The puzzle of life
Author: Arthur Nicols
Release date: March 8, 2025 [eBook #75564]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1877
Credits: Bob Taylor, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUZZLE OF LIFE ***
Transcriber’s Note
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THE
PUZZLE OF LIFE.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
[Illustration:
_Frontispiece_
_The Mammoth._]
THE PUZZLE OF LIFE;
AND
HOW IT HAS BEEN PUT TOGETHER.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FORMATION OF THE EARTH,
WITH ITS VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE,
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES,
INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF
_PRE-HISTORIC MAN, his WEAPONS, TOOLS and WORKS_.
BY
ARTHUR NICOLS, F.R.G.S.
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS by FREDERICK WADDY._
SECOND EDITION.
LONDON:
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1877.
_All rights reserved._
TO
MY YOUNG FRIENDS
BEATRIX, GUY, SYLVIA, MAY, AND GERALD.
THE CHILDREN OF
GEORGE DU MAURIER.
PREFACE
TO
THE SECOND EDITION.
The favourable reception accorded to the first edition has induced me
to give the present a more definite educational character. Foot-notes
are appended, referring to the position in the British Museum of all
the principal antiquities, fossils, and implements mentioned in the
text; so that the specimens can easily be found by any young student
who wishes, with the book in his hand, to make himself familiar with
these records of past time. This will probably facilitate the search
for and recognition of specimens by the reader.
The additions to the text consist chiefly of a more extended account of
the deposition of chalk and other deep-sea formations, founded on the
results of the “Challenger” and “Tuscarora” expeditions, and a sketch
of the earthworks of the Ohio mound-builders and the stone monuments
of Easter Island. Examples of pre-historic art and lake-dwellings have
been added to the illustrations.
A. N.
HAMPSTEAD: _March 1877_.
PREFACE
TO
THE FIRST EDITION.
Having found that children could be interested in the history of life
upon the Earth, and that it appealed forcibly to their understanding,
I considered that a little book upon the subject might give them
the taste for more extended study in after years. The difficulty of
treating the, to them, novel conclusions of geology, often founded on
abstract reasoning, in language simple in form yet stating clearly the
great principles upon which this reasoning rests, will probably be
apparent on every page. Breadth, rather than minuteness, has been aimed
at, in the belief that a general view, not overcrowded with details,
is likely to be the most impressive. Thus, in the geological part the
leading features of the succession of strata have been preserved,
but no details of systematic classification entered into. Similarly,
Primeval Man is considered mainly with reference to gradual progress
from a rude to a more civilized condition. To have been more explicit,
where there is still much difference of opinion, would have obscured
the main facts of the evidence for man’s great antiquity.
The illustrations are typical examples of the three arbitrary but
convenient divisions of the history of life—the vegetable, the animal,
and the human—such as will be most readily met with in museums.
Slight as this sketch is, the liking for it shown by some intelligent
children, who saw it in manuscript, encouraged me to believe that there
are many others to whom it might prove interesting.
Some acquaintance with the leading facts in science is daily becoming
more necessary to those who aspire to liberal culture, and instruction
in them is a recognised feature in the curriculum of some public and
leading private schools. Thus, it is hoped that the present volume
may to some extent serve as a text-book without the severity of such
a form. The best English and foreign authorities have been consulted,
and other trustworthy sources—as papers read before scientific
societies—drawn upon, bringing the information down to the latest time.
Though these pages are designed for young persons, other readers,
perhaps, who are not familiar with the subject, may find some interest
in them if they are not deterred by the necessarily simple style.
My thanks are due to Mr. H. B. WOODWARD, of the Geological Survey
of England and Wales, for some valuable suggestions made during the
progress of the work.
A. N.
HAMPSTEAD: _November 1876_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE 1
THE GEOLOGICAL PART 17
THE VEGETABLE PART 56
THE ANIMAL PART 77
THE HUMAN PART 120
CONCLUSION 168
INDEX 171
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE MAMMOTH _Frontispiece_
I. UPHEAVAL: SUBSIDENCE: DENUDATION 51
II. DIFFERENT KINDS OF PLANTS OF THE COAL FORESTS 65
III. TRILOBITE 79
IV. FOOTPRINTS OF LABYRINTHODON: FOOTPRINTS OF BIRDS,
(2) WITH MARKS OF RAIN-DROPS 83
V. FISH-REPTILES 87
VI. BIRD-REPTILES 93
VII. FOSSILS OF THE CHALK 97
VIII. GIGANTIC IRISH STAG (CERVUS MEGACEROS) 108
IX. THE MEGATHERIUM 112
X. 1. FLINT ARROW-HEAD; 2. STONE AXE IN HANDLE; 3. FLINT KNIFE;
4. BONE HARPOON; 5. BONE NEEDLES; 6. SCEPTRE MADE OF HORN;
7. MARROW SPOON 129
XI. EXAMPLES OF PRE-HISTORIC DRAWINGS 135
XII. LAKE-DWELLINGS 148
XIII. THE GUADALOUPE HUMAN FOSSIL 159
THE
PUZZLE OF LIFE.
_THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE._
You must often have looked with wondering eyes at this World of ours,
and asked yourselves questions about it. How did it come here? What is
it made of? How old is it? All of them questions not to be answered
without a great deal of thought and study, and even then not so
perfectly as we should like. It is easy to say “It is here,” and “It is
made of earth,” and “It surely must be old,” but that will not satisfy
us. We want to know something more certain than this, if possible. We
can see that a clock goes with wheels, but we are not very intelligent
people if we do not want to find out what makes the clock go. One way
of finding out is to pull things to pieces, but we cannot exactly do
this with the World. We must think about it, and put together all the
knowledge we can gain from the outside and inside, and from the other
Worlds around us, which we can see, and when we have done this we may
get something like answers to our questions.
How did it come here? But this is not quite the right way of asking the
question, because the World is never for two moments together in the
same place. It is travelling in a great circle round the Sun at the
rate of more than sixty thousand miles an hour, and has been ever since
it was formed. That is a wonderful arrangement by which all Worlds
travel round some other World larger than themselves, in greater or
less circles, and we do not know why it is, though we are certain that
it is so. The Moon travels round us once in about every month, and we
and the Moon together round the Sun once in every year.
Then again, other planets, with their moons, such as Jupiter, for
instance, travel round the Sun in much larger circles than our World,
and take many years to do the journey, while Venus, which is nearer the
Sun than we are, travels in a much smaller circle, and takes less time.
We do not perceive that we are moving so fast because everything we
see is moving equally fast with us; but there is no doubt that we are
spinning along at sixty thousand miles an hour.
If we ask an astronomer how our World came into existence, he will tell
us that it is probably a mass separated from the Sun, that it was once
red-hot, and that it slowly cooled down until animals and plants could
live upon it. He will tell us besides, that he can see mountains and
valleys in our Moon, and land and sea, snow and clouds, on the planet
Mars, with his great telescopes. When he thinks about the planets and
our own World, then he believes them to be pieces of some much larger
World—perhaps the Sun—which now travel round the Sun and receive their
light and heat from it. The World is made of what we call “earth,” and
it is of this I mean to tell you now—how it was formed, what changes
have taken place in it, what plants and animals have lived upon it,
and what reasons there are for thinking that it is an exceedingly old
place, with a long and interesting story to tell.
Little was known thirty or forty years ago by the most learned men
about the age of our World, and it was thought that the human race
had not lived here very long. It was indeed known that many large
animals, whose huge bones have been found, must have lived before man
came to inhabit the Earth, and that even far smaller creatures—such
as fishes, and crabs, and insects, and shell-fish—most probably lived
for many generations, and died and left their bones and shells in the
soil long before the first man or the first tribes of men came to
share the World with them. I hope to be able to tell you something of
the strange and beautiful history of all these animals, and of man
himself, and to show you what reasons there are now for thinking that
the human race has inhabited this Earth for a very long time indeed,
and how all this knowledge has been gained and put together piece by
piece. It is something like the different parts of a puzzle-map, which
might be scattered all over the house, and found at one time or another
in different places, and at last made up altogether. Some parts of
the puzzle have not been found yet certainly; but so many have been
collected, and they fit into one another so well, that we can begin to
see its real shape and size. It will perhaps be a very long time before
some of the missing pieces are found; but in the meantime we can go on
without them, and put the framework together, and no doubt in time we
shall see what our puzzle, the history of life on the Earth, was like.
Before telling you what its parts are, I ought to say where many of
them have been found, and how they are still being looked for. They are
found _upon_ the ground, _under_ it, in caves, in rivers, and in the
sea. Since railways have been in use a great many tunnels have been
made, as well as very deep cuttings through hills, and some of these
are several miles long. In this way we have come to know something
of the Earth below the surface. Some of these tunnels are bored right
through high hills and even mountains, and the cuttings are deep
enough to hide high houses if they were put into them. While digging
these the workmen have found many of the parts of our puzzle, which
are the bones of animals, and fishes, and shells, and even smaller
things—such as insects. These could not possibly have been put there
by anyone, because they were many, many yards below the surface, and,
until they were dug up, nobody imagined that they could be there. Many
other things besides have been dug out of these places, but nearer the
surface, such as weapons and tools made of flint, and stone, and bone,
and metal, and pieces of rough crockery, and various ornaments, all
of which must at some time or other have been made and used by people
very like ourselves. In digging canals, too, the same kinds of things
have been found, and some caves are almost filled up with them. We have
other means, too, of knowing what is under the surface of the ground
we walk upon. Many of the coal-mines are so deep that the Tower of
London, or St. Paul’s Cathedral, or York Minster, or even the Pyramids
of Egypt could be buried in them! In digging these the workmen have
had to go through a great quantity of earth, sometimes chalk, sand, or
gravel, or clay or limestone, layer upon layer, placed, like a pile
of books of different kinds and different thicknesses, one upon the
other, until they have come to the coal. In these different layers of
earth parts of the puzzle have been found, and we shall see by-and-by
what parts have been found in the coal itself. Then again, when deep
mines are made to get the metals, iron and gold and silver, these
layers of earth have to be dug through; and when the beautiful kinds
of stone, like marble and limestone, are wanted, they must be dug out
of the sides of the hills, and in doing this still more pieces of the
puzzle come to hand. But there are other places where Nature herself
seems to have shown us some of them without the trouble of searching
for them. In many parts of the World, by the sea, and on the banks of
rivers, there are cliffs hundreds of feet high, like the chalk cliffs
at Dover and Ramsgate, and the sandy cliffs at Folkestone and on the
south coast of Devonshire. These cliffs have been cut into by the sea
very gradually, and a kind of wall has been left, and from the sides of
the cliffs great numbers of the pieces of the puzzle, bones, shells,
&c., have been collected and taken away to museums. But the little we
can do with our mines and railway tunnels is nothing in comparison with
the work of Nature. In some of the great mountain chains—the Andes, the
Himalayas, and the Alps, for instance—parts of the sides of mountains
have fallen down, and rents many miles long have been left, showing
what had been buried there in the different kinds of soil; and where
rivers have cut deep, narrow channels through the earth, like the
Cañons of Colorado, these natural miners have turned out more of the
parts of “the puzzle of life” than we can with all our labour.
It will not be easy at first to understand all the wonders I have to
show you, but, when we get further on, you will see them one by one,
and there will be very little difficulty. You know now where these
things are to be found: principally in the ground you walk upon,
without knowing all there is beneath you. The creatures here are
much more wonderful than any of the monsters of fairy tale or fable,
because the works of God are greater than the imagination of men who
have invented the stories of flying dragons and griffins, and trees
which grew up into the skies; but I cannot help thinking that this
imagination shows what men thought _might_ once have been, and we shall
see that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Creatures really did live on
this Earth of such strange shapes and great size that the imaginations
of those who wrote the fairy tales did not exaggerate much; and, though
we know that no flying serpents or immense birds like the Roc are
living now, and that there is no beanstalk which grows up into the sky
while we are asleep, we shall see that there were lizards as large as
whales, and birds taller than elephants, and great sloths stronger than
the rhinoceros or hippopotamus, and ferns as high as oak trees, and
mosses as large as gooseberry bushes; and that perhaps these animals
and plants grew much faster than they do now, and that their dead
bodies form a very large part of the earth of our World. This is not
imagination, and when you go to a museum you can see all these wonders
for yourselves, just as they were taken out of the earth; but of course
the bones only of the animals are there. The flesh has long since gone
away, and some of the stalks and fronds (leaves) only of the ferns
remain to show us how large they must have been when they were alive
and growing.
It will be necessary to use a few scientific names, most of which are
borrowed from the Greek and Latin languages, but I will explain the
meaning of them all, so that they will be easily remembered. First of
all, then, the pieces of the puzzle are called _fossils_, and the name
comes from a Latin word meaning “dug out;” because they have been dug
out of the ground either by man in making railways and mines, or by
Nature in the many ways in which she works by cutting down cliffs and
scooping out valleys. These fossils are bones of animals and fishes,
the skins, shells, and wings of insects, and the stalks and leaves
of plants, some of which have lain so very long in the ground that
they have become as hard and heavy as stone. But the shape of them
always remains, and the moment you look at them you see that they once
belonged to living creatures.
I shall give you pictures of some of these fossils; and no doubt you
will be able to find some like them in the chalk and sands of the
seaside—beautiful shells and bones of fishes. You may pick these out
of the cliffs, and then go to the pools of salt water left among the
rocks by the ebbing tide, and compare your fossils with the living
shell-fish, and see how nearly those inhabitants of the ancient oceans
resemble the creatures we find now, sporting in the water, just as
these fossils did when the sand and chalk cliffs were under the sea.
Of course all the bright colours are gone from the fossils, for the
colour of animals fades away soon after they die, and the flesh does
not last long; but the hard parts—the bones and shells—are not easily
destroyed, because they are made of the same material as rocks. And
when we look at the fossil plants we see the same thing. The colours of
the green stems and leaves have quite faded, but the delicate shapes of
the leaves and branches, and the grain of the wood, can still be seen,
and you will have no doubt that they once lived and bore flowers and
fruit, and died, as plants are living and dying every day.
You have got so far now that you know what fossils are, and where they
may be found. You know that they are the small and large pieces of the
“puzzle of life”—of all sorts of different shapes and sizes—and you
know that they are scattered about the Earth, deep down in coal-mines,
on the tops of mountains, at the bottoms of rivers, in deep caves,
and under the sea. The patience and industry of clever men have been
well spent in gathering together all they can find, and arranging
them in museums for our instruction, and making a history of them
which is more wonderful than the Arabian Nights, and more beautiful
because it is all _true_. And, though you may think it strange that I
promise to show you creatures more marvellous than those of the fairy
tales, I shall keep that promise faithfully. We shall find no Genii
with wonderful lamps and magic rings, because they never really lived,
though it gave us much pleasure and amusement to read about them; but
we shall see what God, the greatest Genius of all, has done by means of
His magicians—the laws of Nature. These magicians have built up high
mountains and dug out valleys, and sent mighty rivers sweeping down
to the sea, and even filled up oceans with sand and chalk, and buried
ancient forests deep down under sea and land. They worked with fire,
and air, and water; not quickly, but with such strength that nothing
could resist them, and they gradually moulded the Earth into the
beautiful thing it is, so that
In contemplation of created things,
By steps we may ascend to God.—_Milton._
But, lovely as the Earth is, we should not perhaps have thought so
much of it if there had been nothing to discover. We see that it has
been prepared for us an immensely long time ago; and when we know a
little, we want to search further and find out what the whole plan of
Creation is, so far as we can. You will be surprised when you know how
many signs of past life there are around you—many more than you can see
with the eye. The Earth is one great burying-place of creatures which
have passed away. You are walking over their dead and fossil bodies
at almost every step. They are built into the walls of our houses,
and there are millions of them in some of the commonest stones of the
pavement. Those round, smooth pebbles, called flint stones, which we
pick out of the gravel walks, were once partly such soft tender things
as sponges; but time has hardened them, and they have been rolled
together in seas and rivers by the always moving water until they have
become quite different to look at from the rough blue flints they were
when they were washed out of the chalk beds. When you are walking
along the sands of some seacoasts, you are treading on little specks
of these small flints which have been ground down fine in that great
mill, the ocean. The sponges, then, did some part in the building up of
the Earth. The very chalk you draw with is composed of the shells of
sea-animals. Your slates and slate pencils were once a fine mud at the
bottom of the sea, since become so hard that it is used for covering
the roofs of our houses, and in this mud lived myriads of small
shell-fish which have sometimes left their frail houses in the slate
beds to tell us how they were made. That slate is the hardened mud of
an old sea bottom, there is no doubt at all.
There are many other things in common use which show us the life that
was.
Perhaps you did not know that coals are _compressed plants_, and that
we are now burning the vegetation of the past time! But these will be
described in their right places by-and-by, and you will see how certain
it is that some of the commonest things we use were living creatures
and graceful plants.
Here is “the framework” of the puzzle, and I think you will agree with
me that we shall have pleasure in putting it together with all the
queerly-shaped pieces we shall find in the following chapters. We have
fossil plants to show us what grew upon the Earth, fossil bones to tell
us what animals lived here, and thousands of different kinds of fossil
shells and fishes to show us that the seas in the long past time were
crowded with life; and besides, though there are no written histories
of the men whom we shall read about, they, too, have left many things
which they used in the caves where they lived and in their graves, to
make us feel certain that they were some of the oldest people that
ever lived. With all these things to help us, it will be strange if we
cannot make out a great deal of the history of life upon our Earth.
_THE GEOLOGICAL PART._
You will have learned from other books something about the size and
shape of our World: for instance, that it is a great round body, or
rather more like an orange, a little flatter one way than the other,
and about 8,000 miles through, from one side to the other, and that
it turns round once in every twenty-four hours; but I have only to
tell you now what it is made of. The material is called rock, earth,
or soil; and there are many kinds of it, such as granite, gravel,
clay, sand, chalk, mud, and so on; and we shall see that many of these
different soils contain different fossils.
It is supposed that a very long time passed while these were being
laid one upon another, and before many plants or animals lived here,
and there are good reasons for thinking that underneath these soils
the Earth is very hot, perhaps in a melting state, because we know
that volcanoes like Vesuvius and Ætna throw out flame and smoke and
lava, which is melted earth and rock; and that this lava has run down
the sides of the mountains for miles, in a great stream of liquid
material, and covered up and destroyed whole villages and towns. You
have heard of earthquakes, when the ground shakes and cracks, and
houses are thrown down, as they have often been in Spain, Italy, and
South America. This convinces us that the inside of the earth must be
very different from the outside. Two or three years ago Mount Vesuvius
was boiling up, and the people of Naples feared that it would throw
out some of the terrible lava and red-hot cinders, and burn up their
vineyards and perhaps injure their city; and during the last two or
three years many people have been killed by earthquakes in South
America. These things seldom happen in the North of Europe, and when
they do they are only slightly felt, and people are not killed, neither
are houses thrown down. Still, this shows that there must be some
great force underneath us, and very much heat. We see nothing of this
when we look upon the green fields, and we should scarcely think it
possible if there were not histories about these eruptions, as they are
called. But when I tell you that I have felt the Earth tremble, and
seen fire rushing out from the top of a high mountain whose sides were
covered with snow, you will understand how real it is—though it may
seem so strange.
People at one time liked to fancy that powerful spirits lived in
volcanoes and made them their workshops: but we know better now.
Well, the interior of the Earth is evidently very different from the
part we live upon; and it is the outside we have to think about now,
which would be dreadfully cold if the sun did not shine upon it, though
the inside is so hot.
I have called this “the Geological Part,” and the name Geological comes
from two Greek words meaning “a talk about the earth;” but now you know
it in its English dress it will be easy to recollect it. Geology is
then the study of the many kinds of rocks and fossils which makeup our
World, but we must know something of the way in which they are placed.
You may have noticed, if you have made many journeys to different
parts of England or Wales, that the rocks or soils are very different
in various places. Sometimes we find numerous chalk-pits, as in parts
of Kent, or Sussex; if we go into Devonshire we may notice the very
red colour of the soil and of the cliffs, especially near Sidmouth,
Dawlish, and Teignmouth; in North Wales we find great quarries and
hills of slate; while around London we see a great deal of clay used
for making bricks, and called the London clay, as well as many pits in
gravel so useful for making paths and mending roads, and in Kent and
Sussex chalk cliffs and hills are common.
Now after studying these various rocks all over our country, we find
that there is a certain regular order in which they are found; some
have been made a long time before others, and while most kinds contain
some fossils, those found in the oldest rocks are much less like the
living plants and animals than the fossils we find in the newer rocks.
But you will want to know how it is that we can tell that one rock
is older than another, when both appear at the surface of the earth.
It would take a long time to make sure of this for ourselves, but
it will be enough to say that the various cliffs, quarries, and
railway-cuttings often show one kind of rock resting upon another,
and these always occur in a certain order. Thus we never find the
Chalk resting on the London Clay, but we constantly find the London
Clay resting on the Chalk. And this is proved in another way, by deep
well-borings. Underneath London many wells have been carried down right
through the London Clay, and if only continued deep enough they always
reach the Chalk. In the same way, the order of the other rocks has
been ascertained in different parts of the country, by examining all
the pits and quarries, and cliffs and cuttings, with the help of what
knowledge can be obtained from deep mines and wells.
You will now begin to wonder why the older rocks should appear at the
surface. I have told you about earthquakes, and you will find that many
dreadful earthquakes must in former times have ravaged our country.
The reason why the old rocks come to the surface is because they have
been lifted up sometimes violently, but more often very slowly. And the
newer rocks which formerly rested on them have very often been quite
washed away, either by the sea or by rivers and little streams which
formerly acted upon them.
Suppose then we take six books, some thick and some thin, and pile
them up together on the table, the lowest being a good thick one. The
lowest we will call granite, the next slate, the third sandstone, the
fourth coal, the fifth chalk, and the sixth the London clay. These will
represent some of the principal kinds of earths, and you can fancy many
more with other names coming between them; but the London clay can
never be below the granite nor the chalk below the coal, for the great
coal beds were formed long before the chalk and clay. They generally
come in much the same order as we have named them, hard rocks like
granite at the bottom, and softer earths, like sandstone, chalk and
clay, a long way above them. But we do not always find all these earths
in one place even if we dig ever so deeply, though the granite would
always be found at the bottom if we went deep enough.
Sometimes the granite and other old rocks have been pushed through
the upper layers by some great force, and have broken them and risen
above them in magnificent mountain chains, like those of the Andes in
South, and the Rocky Mountains in North America, the Wicklow Mountains
in Ireland, the Grampians in Scotland, and the Cornish mountains in
England. We can easily suppose that the lowest of our books (the
granite book) has been pushed upwards by some great force from below,
and parts of it broken through the others, and raised high above them;
and this is what has actually been done with real rocks. And as this
kind of upheaval has taken place at different periods of the earths
history, we find that granites have come to the surface at different
times.
When the layers are thus broken through they are often tilted up on end
and tumbled about in confusion. But where there has been no disturbance
like this, they generally rest evenly upon one another in their proper
order.
Granite, and rocks of the same kind, are not in the least like chalk,
or clay, or even sandstone, and when once you have seen any of these
you will not be likely to mistake it for the others. Granite is
excessively hard, and has a beautiful appearance when polished, with a
number of brilliant white and some dark specks in it. It is used for
paving the streets of towns, for which purpose it is cut into oblong
blocks, and for the pillars of fine buildings. Sometimes it is dark
brown, sometimes reddish, but generally a bluish grey. This rock is
composed of a great quantity of crystals, and for this reason it is
thought it must have been melted at one time by intense heat in the
earth, and afterwards slowly cooled. Chalk is very different, and
sandstone, though it is also hard, not in the least like granite.
HOW THE ROCKS WERE FORMED.
What I have just said is about all that we know of the formation of the
oldest and hardest granite rocks: but there is something going on now
which confirms the belief that the materials of which they are made
were melted together by a greater heat than we can make in our furnaces
for melting iron; for I should tell you that it is easier to melt iron
and copper than granite rocks. Volcanoes often throw out melted earths
which when cooled appear to be made of much the same materials as these
granites.
SANDSTONE.
But we know more of the manner of the formation of sandstone. This rock
is composed of rounded grains of sand just like that we find upon the
sea shore. If you take a handful of this sand and squeeze it tightly,
it will keep together a little while. Now suppose a quantity of this
sand was pressed by a very great weight—the weight of a large hill
for instance—after many years the grains would stick firmly together,
and become a sort of stone. It is in this way the sandstones must have
been formed, and perhaps heat helped the work, though not so great a
heat as melted the granite. The sand, after it had been washed upon
the sea shore, became gradually covered with other earths hundreds of
feet thick, and the immense weight above it pressed it into stone: but
you may imagine how very long a time it took to do this. Sandstones
are used for building, but they do not last very long; the frost makes
little cracks in them and they soon crumble away to the grains of sand
of which they were made. Several fossils are found in some of these
sandstones, which have been formed at many different periods of the
earth’s history.
CHALK.
You have seen those high cliffs of chalk along the south coast of
England, perhaps, and you have wondered what that beautiful white
earth was, and how it came there. It is found in many parts of the
world, and the south and south-east of England are to a great extent
composed of it. The material is called by chemists carbonate of lime.
It is almost entirely made up of minute shells called _foraminifera_,
from two Latin words which mean that there are many openings or
chambers in their shells, and there are many beautiful fossils called
_ammonites_ imbedded in the chalk. These are shell-fish, two or three
inches, and sometimes a foot across, and their shape is very like that
of the young leaves of the common fern before it has opened in the
spring.
Millions of these tiny foraminifera are living now in parts of the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and when they die their shells sink to the
bottom and form a greyish mud, something like chalk.
When H.M.S. “Challenger” was sent out in the year 1873, to find out
what was at the bottom of the deepest seas of the World, great interest
was felt in the expedition, because we were sure that we should learn
something about the manner in which some of the rocks were formed.
We knew that the whole of the beds of the present seas must be
receiving the washings of the rivers and the bodies of many fishes and
animals, and that the rocks of the future must be forming down there
by these accumulations. Long lines were let down from the ship with a
dredge at the end, and thus parts of the bottom of the sea were brought
up and carefully examined. It was found that the washings, stones,
clay, and mud of the land were carried hundreds of miles out to sea,
and laid upon the bottom. But in the deeper parts, where the Alps would
be almost covered—there was a fine grey mud composed almost entirely of
the shells of the little foraminifera, and this, no doubt, is the chalk
of future times, or perhaps limestone of a harder kind. Deeper, too,
than where this grey mud is found, there is a reddish mud, exceedingly
fine and soft. We cannot exactly say yet whether this is formed from
the remains of shell-fish; but it is, at all events, very like the clay
of the land, and in some future time will most likely become like
that stiff mud we know so well. So that even the materials for bricks
are being made now, and perhaps when all those hundreds of islands
scattered about the Pacific Ocean are joined into one great Continent,
this red mud will be raised and made use of for building the houses of
new peoples and nations.
When we see this going on now, of course it is very easy to conclude
that the chalk, a great deal of which is above the sea now, must have
been formed in the same way at the bottom of an ancient ocean, and
afterwards raised by the same kind of upward force which made the
granite break through other earths.
If we did not know that the same cause was at work now, and that the
same kinds of shell-fish were living and laying down new beds of chalk
under the sea, we should not know how to account for the quantities of
chalk in the world. For innumerable ages these little creatures have
thus been paving the floor of the ocean with their dead bodies, and you
may suppose that countless millions of them must have lived and died!
In some of the chalks the shells of the foraminifera can be quite
distinctly seen with a microscope, and when these are compared with the
shells of living ones, they are seen to be almost exactly alike. Next
time you pass through one of the railway cuttings through the chalk
in going to Brighton, or Ramsgate, or Dover, remember that those high
cliffs were built up by these Liliputian giants under the sea, and you
may think of the chalk as “foraminifera earth”.
COAL.
You see this black shining substance almost every day, and you know it
is dug up from very deep pits where the poor miners are often killed by
explosions of gas escaping from it. But it is as well to know what it
is and how it comes to be so useful to us. In the language of chemistry
it is called “carbon”, and a great writer has given it the poetical
name of “compressed sunlight”. But you will ask how sunlight could
possibly get into a deep mine, and how it could be compressed there.
You will see that the explanation is really quite simple by-and-by.
This coal was once above ground, and was a splendid forest of waving
palm-trees, and ferns, and gigantic mosses, as you will see by the
pictures of the fossils of them.
Many of the animals and plants of past times were giants compared to
those living now, of the same species or kind, and many of the plants
of the present time are dwarfs to those of the same kind which formed
the coal beds. Many generations of trees must have grown and died, and
others must have sprung up, and so on, until beds of them, some ten,
others twenty, or even thirty feet thick, were formed. Here, buried in
the coal, are the stems, leaves, bark, roots, fruit, and seeds of these
trees, and we can have no doubt that almost the whole of the coal is
composed of them. You must not expect to find the shapes of these in
every piece of coal you may happen to look at, because most of it has
been greatly changed by the great weight and pressure upon it, and the
length of time: but it is certainly all the same substance—wood turned
into coal. The fossil plants of the coal are of course entirely black,
but there is no mistake about their having once been living plants.
You will ask perhaps how the coal came to be buried so deep. It is not
so always, being sometimes at the surface. But just as the granite has
been pushed up through the other rocks, so has the coal in some places
been uplifted and in others has sunk down. It was often covered up by
other earths to a great depth, after the trees which composed it had
died; but where it is now at the surface these newer earths have been
afterwards worn away. When the sun shone upon these coal trees they
took its warmth and light into their stems and leaves, for they could
not live without, and this made them grow so fast and become so large
that it is not untrue to call coal “compressed sunlight.” Charcoal is
in some respects so like coal that it would seem to you at once that
they were probably the same material. Charcoal is simply burnt wood,
and when the coal forests had died down, and when these beds sank down
beneath other layers the pressure and heat together turned the wood
and leaves into a hard mass like charcoal in colour, but heavier and
more solid, and just enough of the stems and leaves have been left to
enable us to know with certainty that coal was once wood.
We light our fires now and drive our steam-engines with the heat of the
sun which shone upon the coal forests, and has been stored up for many
thousands of years in the Earth, to be brought out once more to give us
light and warmth.
CLAY AND MUD.
While the ancient forests were growing up to form the coal beds,
and the foraminifera were slowly building up the chalk, as I have
explained, the Earth was covered with water in some places which are
now dry land, and the sea now flows over parts of the World which were
once the habitations of plants and animals. These great changes have
left their marks upon many a mountain side, and many an old river or
sea bed has become filled up. A map of Europe during the chalk period
would show that the places where Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Berlin
now are were then under the ocean; but since then these places have
been lifted up, and mud, clay, and gravel swept over the chalk in many
places by the action of new rivers and seas. Water, you perceive, has
had a great deal to do with these changes, and indeed it is one of
Nature’s most powerful tools, for it can wash down rocks and cliffs and
cut its way in rivers for thousands of miles over the Earth’s surface.
It carries down mud, and clay, and gravel, and this soil, which has
been named alluvium, is one of the most interesting of all to us,
because it contains the bones of the immense animals we shall talk
about presently, as well as those of the oldest races of men with their
weapons and ornaments.
The mud age, and we are in the mud and gravel age now, belongs to what
is called the Tertiary period, and we shall see that this age has
lasted a very long time already, so long that though it is still going
on, the most extraordinary animals have lived and died, and not one of
them is now left alive. Still the same washing and cutting of water is
going on which buried their bones in swamps, and bogs, and river caves,
and may perhaps carry away some of the bones of us who are living now,
to be found ages afterwards by future generations who will read our
history in these silent witnesses, as we read the history of the tree
ferns and foraminifera in the coal and the chalk.
The present age of the World’s history is the Mud age, or, as we shall
call it in future, the Tertiary period, and I think you will agree with
me when I come to describe it, that it contains the most interesting of
all the pieces of “the puzzle of life.”
The earth of the Tertiary period is very different from a great many of
the older earths. Clay, mud, and gravel are the washings only of the
older rocks, the fine particles which have been worn off from them by
frost and water and carried down by rivers and left in large beds, and
sometimes they have a good deal of decayed wood and weeds mixed with
them. Here are found the bones of the great animals which were so much
larger and stronger than those of the same kind living now, or any that
lived before them.
UPHEAVAL AND DEPRESSION.
These two words are so often used in books on geology that we shall
not be able to get on without knowing their meaning. We have seen
that the rocks have been formed in a certain way—some by heat, some
by water, and some by dead forests—and that they lie over one another
in pretty regular order. But this order has sometimes been disturbed
and the layers have been tumbled about among one another very much. In
some places the older rocks, such as granite, slate, and sandstone,
have been pushed up through those above, and in others the coal has
sunk down and been covered with thick layers of chalk, sand, and mud.
When the force below pushes a layer up through the others it is called
_upheaval_, and when a layer sinks down it is called _depression_,
or _subsidence_. Both these actions are going on now in different
parts of the Earth. A great part of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, of
Spitzbergen, Siberia, and the north of America, is being slowly raised
higher above the sea, as we know by the height their old sea beaches
now are above the water; while part of the shore of America opposite
to Europe and also the south of Greenland is slowly sinking down, as
we know by the remains of land animals and trees which are now covered
by the tide; and at many places on the coast of India this subsidence
is also going on. Nearer home, too, there is an example of it in the
island of Guernsey. All round the coast of this island, like that of
Jersey, are found tree trunks and other remains of old forest land
beneath the water. Old histories refer to this as dry land; and if a
map of it made in 1406 is correct, this land must have sunk about 150
feet since that time.
Thus we can see, even at the present time, the very same changes which
have worked upon our Earth for innumerable ages. It is now easy to
understand how the forests which must have grown above in the air
have, after a long time, sunk down to a great depth, and been turned
into coal, and covered with the sediment, sand, gravel, and chalk from
the seas which afterwards flowed over the places where they grew.
Sometimes the rocks by the sea shore are cut into terraces or steps
by the constant wear of the water, and when we see these water marks
far above the present level of the sea we know that the land must have
been lifted up gradually above the sea. There are many such terraces in
Norway. To prove whether this is so marks have been cut upon rocks at
a measured height above the sea, and after some years these marks have
been noticed to have been raised much above the water by the “upheaval”
of the earth at that place.
Generally this change of level has taken place gradually, and the
greatest work in moving the layers of earth and displacing them has
been very slow. But in some places violent and sudden shocks have
happened, tearing up the rocks and piling them up in heaps; and now
and then islands have suddenly appeared in the sea and vanished out
of sight completely in a short time. Islands have thus come up in the
Mediterranean Sea within the memory of man. In the year 1831 the island
of Julia suddenly appeared near the coast of Sicily, and since the year
186 B.C. no less than three islands have started up in the bay of the
island of Santorin. In this century islands have appeared among the
Azores, the Indian Archipelago, the Philippines, the Moluccas, and on
the coast of Kamtschatka and other places. Some of these have appeared
suddenly, others slowly, and they no doubt have been raised by a great
force from below.
You will see now how easy it is to account for the changes of the
places of the layers of rock. The same thing is going on now which
has been going on throughout all time, only perhaps with more energy
formerly than now, making mountains, islands, and continents, raising
up a large tract of land in one place and sinking an island or a sea
shore in another.
These changes have been of great use to us too. Suppose all England
had been covered with coal or slate, we should not have been able to
grow anything! As it is we have sand and gravel in one county, chalk in
another, slate or granite in another, and coal down below in several,
and we can grow a great variety of plants on all these different soils.
We have to thank “upheaval” and “depression” for this. The force which
is always working below us has turned up the different soils like a
gigantic plough, and brought some to the top and covered others, so
that instead of having to dig down deeper than ever we have yet, we
have only to go from one county to another to find the different rocks.
We know that we could not get at the coal in Sussex without going down
an unknown depth through the chalk and other earths, but we dig for it
in the North of England, where we know its depth below the surface.
I will try now to give you some idea of the way in which the rocks come
in their order, or the succession of formations as geologists call
it. If we started to walk from Wales to London the rocks we should
pass over would be—slate and flagstones in Wales, and going on towards
London, limestone, old red sandstone, more limestones, coal beds, new
red sandstone, oolite, greensand, chalk, and last London clay. We
might not always find each of these near the surface, but they would
be found to be the principal rocks on a line between Wales and London,
the oldest being in Wales and the newest or most recent as we get
nearer London. That word “oolite” which I used comes from two Greek
words meaning “roe” and “stone,” because the rock is composed of little
rounded grains of a chalky substance shaped like the hard roe of a
fish, or like sago before it is cooked.
If you look at the following table you will see how the principal rocks
are placed one upon the other, beginning at the lowest or oldest at the
bottom and going up to the newest at the top of the table, and on the
right hand side I have written the names of the principal fossils which
each kind of earth contains.
TABLE OF THE SUCCESSION OF FORMATIONS.
TERTIARY, or Upper Rocks
Peat bogs and caves Fossil Man, with stone implements,
River-mud and brickearth, &c., mammoth,
gravels, and hippopotamus, rhinoceros,
boulder clay (alluvium) Irish stag, cave lion,
&c.
Crag of Eastern Counties Numerous shell-fish, mastodon
London clay, &c. Turtles, crocodiles, shell-fish
SECONDARY, or Middle Rocks
Cretaceous
Chalk (with and without Foraminifera, &c., sponges,
flints) corals, sea-urchins, shell-fish
Greensand and gault (Belemnites, Ammonites,
Wealden clay, &c. &c.), fishes
Oolites
Portland stone
Kimmeridge clay
Coral rag Immense reptiles, the Ichthyosaurus,
Oxford clay Plesiosaurus,
Cornbrash and forest Megalosaurus, Pterodactyl,
marble &c.
Great oolite
Fullers’ earth Animals allied to the opossum
Lower oolite and kangaroo
Lias clay and limestone Cycads and other plants
New red marl and
sandstone
PRIMARY, or Lower Rocks
Coal Ferns, club-mosses, a few
Millstone grit firs, calamites, &c., in
Mountain limestone great abundance
Old red sandstone Numerous corals, shell-fish,
Silurian limestones and trilobites, fishes, &c.
slates
Cambrian slates The Laurentian rocks contain
Laurentian rocks the oldest known
fossil, the Eozöon (or
“life-dawn animal”)
IGNEOUS, or Volcanic Rocks
Greenstone, basalt Of various ages (no fossils)
Porphyry
Granite, &c.
If you read this table upwards from the bottom you will notice that
life began in a very small way with Eozöon (the “life-dawn animal”),
that fishes appeared afterwards, that the wonderful forests of the coal
period then grew and were covered up by other rocks and pressed into
solid coal, that numbers of great crocodile-like animals lived all
through the oolite time, how the deep wide beds of chalk were laid down
by humble foraminifera, and when we get to the recent newest beds of
gravel, mud, sand, clay, &c., the sweepings by water of the older rocks
ground down by ages of wear and tear, we have the mammoth, mastodon,
megatherium, and other great vegetable eaters, and lastly Man himself
with his simple weapons of stone, bone, and horn—our early forefathers.
You must always keep in mind that the greatest of these changes
have taken place very slowly. Mountains have been raised, and whole
continents have been sunk by movements so slow that if the hands of a
clock went only once round the dial in a year the hand would go faster
than these mountains have risen or the continents sunk. Almost always
whenever there has been sudden and _violent_ action it has been near
volcanoes or during earthquakes; but these things, terrible as they
are to the people living near, disturb only a very small part of the
surface, and such violence neither buried the coal beds nor raised
the slate hills of Wales. Many of the small effects of the internal
force of the earth have been sudden and violent, but the greatest and
grandest have been slower than anything we can imagine.
If this had not been so, we should not find fossil shells just as they
sank quietly to the bottom of ancient seas, quite undisturbed. We
should not find delicate ferns and insects with all their breakable
parts perfectly preserved, and as lightly laid as if you had put
them away carefully in a cabinet upon cotton wool. Yet many of these
have sunk down hundreds of feet below the open air where they _must_
have lived. We find the ripple marks of the waves on old sandstones,
and even the prints of the feet of birds and animals as they walked
upon that rock when it was soft sand, and the little pits made by
rain-drops on the moist earth. All this speaks of stillness, and
gentle movement, no violence. So slowly and softly have these rocks
settled down, that we can read in them the history of the life that
was. But if there had been any sudden and rough movement all these
fossils might have been broken up and we should have had nothing but
fragments, and the “puzzle of life” could never have been put together.
Nature’s forces are immense, but they work slowly, irresistibly, and
majestically.
THE ICE AGE.
We have seen now what the principal rocks are made of and the way
in which their places have been changed by upheaval and depression.
Water, as we know, has been at work and has done great things in _all_
ages of the World’s history. I have called it “one of Nature’s most
powerful tools,” and when we look at the quantity of chalk alone that
there is in the world, and remember that this was all laid down in
water, and perhaps a great part of its lime carried down by rivers to
the seas where it settled to the bottom, after the corals and small
shell-fish had worked it into their bodies, we are right in thinking
water a great Magician indeed. Why, even so small a river as the Thames
carries down to the sea every year as much dissolved earth as would
make a good large hill; and what must such rivers as the Nile, the
Amazon, the Mississippi, and the great Chinese rivers do! There must
have been gigantic rivers, too, in the old times, or else it would have
been impossible that the deep sandstone and slate beds could have been
formed; for these are all laid down by the washing away of earth in
water.
Ice, which is only solid water, has also been a powerful tool in
shaping the surface of the Earth, but it has not been _always_ at
work as water has. Ice now covers only a comparatively small part of
the globe near the north and south poles, and mountains like those in
Switzerland; but by watching what ice is doing now in these places we
are able to be certain that there has been a time when it covered
Scotland, Cumberland, Wales, Sweden and Norway, and nearly all North
America. In watching the great “rivers of ice,” called glaciers, in
the Alps, for instance, we see that they slip down from the mountains
slowly, creeping on year by year, and bringing with them pieces of
rock and stones. We see also where they have melted that they have
been grinding the rocks beneath them with their great weight, and have
cut grooves into, and scraped and polished the hardest granite. The
stones underneath the glaciers have been pressed so heavily upon the
rocks that they have left deep marks, and we find the same kinds of
marks and heaps of stones in many mountains where there are no glaciers
now. There are other things too which convince us that a great ice
sheet spread over almost the whole of Great Britain. When the huge
icebergs break away from the frozen shores of Greenland and North
America, they often have frozen into their ice large blocks of rock,
sand, gravel, &c., and when they drift into the warmer seas of the
south they melt, and of course these blocks or “boulders,” as they are
called, sink to the bottom. Just the same kind of boulders are found
in many parts of the world, where icebergs never come now, and as they
are of a different rock from that on which they lie, they must have
been brought there somehow. We naturally suppose then that they were
brought by icebergs. Sometimes boulders of granite have been found thus
among clay, many miles from where there are any granite rocks on the
surface, and there can be no doubt that they were originally frozen
into an iceberg, which floated away with them and when it melted left
them so far from their native place. In many of the midland and eastern
counties once floated these icebergs, dropping the stones and boulders
which they brought away from the Welsh, Cumberland, and Scottish
mountains.
The climate of the earth must have been fearfully cold when our country
was covered with ice, just as Greenland is now. Geologists suppose that
there must have been more than one age of ice, and that between these
ages the climate of the world was pretty much the same as at present,
although it is certain that there were periods when England was much
warmer, because many of the fossil plants could not have grown in a
cold climate.
You will want to know whether there were any land animals living during
the ice periods. It is impossible to be quite certain, but it is most
likely that the mammoth was living both before and during the _last_
ice age, because its bones have been found among the earths brought
down by the glaciers.
I have said all you will be likely to remember at present about the
nature of the different rocks, but it will help you to understand
better how they have been laid one upon the other, and how they have
been moved and broken by upheaval and subsidence, if you look at the
drawings on page 51.
DENUDATION.
It has often happened that some of the harder and older rocks, like
granite and slate, have pushed themselves through those earths lying
above them, and then the sea or a great river has washed away all the
earths from one side of the rock. The rain, too, falling for thousands
of years, has swept them down into the valleys and mixed them together.
This is called denudation, or “laying bare” the harder rocks by washing
the softer ones away from them. Those beds of pebbles on the sea shore
also have been battering against the rocks for ages and very gradually
wearing them away, as you can see if you watch the stones being driven
into and sucked out of holes and cracks by every wave. Thus, both
the loose stones and the solid rocks get polished and ground away,
and Nature is always destroying and making again by turns. If this
destruction went on continually without any raising of the land to make
up for it, the surface of the whole Earth would in time become level;
but old sea beds are always being slowly raised above the water and
prepared for the growth of plants and the habitation of animals.
[Illustration: _Upheaval._]
[Illustration: _Subsidence._]
[Illustration: _Denudation._]
If you watch the little rills of water on any rainy day, trickling
down a hill, or the springs which bubble up at the foot of cliffs on
the sea shore, you will see an example of denudation in a small way.
The earth is washed off the surface here and there, and carried down
and laid up in banks in some places, and the harder ground underneath
is laid bare. Little beds of stones are collected in one place, and
sticks and straws and such light things in another, and this is just
what has been done on a large scale in mountain regions, all over the
world for many centuries.
In the uppermost sketch on page 51 you will see how the granite has
been lifted up with the layers of other earth along its sides, and
afterwards even layers have been deposited above; in the second there
has been a great crack in the land, and a great mass of rock has
subsided, and the hollow has become filled up in time with clay, and
mould, and rich soil, so that some one has built a house and made a
garden on it; in the third the river has cut a gorge in rocks which
were once continuous from cliff to cliff, wearing away the softer
earths more easily than the harder. If the Earth was cut into in
different places we should find the rocks arranged in a very similar
way to that in the three sketches.
BOILING SPRINGS, ETC.
In several different countries there are very strange sights, but
scarcely anything is more astonishing than the fountains of boiling
water which shoot up out of the ground. There are a good many of them
not far from us, in Iceland, and many hundreds in Wyoming in America,
and they are called “geysers.” Steam and boiling water, and sometimes
mud, are thrown up by these natural fountains to a height of 200
feet—as high as the top of the spire of a church. The water must come
from a great depth in the ground—perhaps many thousand feet down—where
the heat is intense. This water springing up with clouds of snow-white
steam, and falling all round in showers, has a most beautiful
appearance. These geysers now and then throw out very little water,
just bubbling up above the ground, and then travellers boil eggs and
chickens and such things in them, and have a pic-nic near them. It is
impossible to say how long they have lasted, but we know from history
that some have been spouting out water for at least 2,000 years, and
how much longer no one can tell. They may have something to do with
volcanoes, because water may have found its way to the heated interior
of the earth, and being converted into steam, expands and causes an
eruption.
Now that we have some idea of the construction of the Earth, we must
go on to the _life_ of the wonderful plants and creatures which have
peopled it.
_THE VEGETABLE PART._
THE DAWN OF LIFE.
The first beams of the rising sun, and the first grey light of the
morning, tell us of the coming day; but we cannot even think of the
dawn of that far-off day in the Earth’s history, when no voice of man
or beast was heard, and no trees or grass covered it, without solemn
wonder at the immense distance that day is from us. A thousand ages are
in the sight of the Creator but as yesterday, and the period of man’s
existence is only a moment compared to that of the lowly creatures
which built up this World for him. In the first seas and on the land
nothing was heard but the rushing of waters and the roaring of the
fires of volcanoes.
It is impossible to be quite certain whether the first living things
were animals or plants; but I think it most likely that very simple
plants grew first, and that very simple animals came after or with
them. Among the first of these, or perhaps the very first, were some
small animals called _Eozöon_, which means the “life-dawn animal,” and
with them grew some simple plants. On the banks of the St. Lawrence
river in Canada there is a great bed of rock called the Laurentian
rocks, made almost entirely of the tiny remains of the “life-dawn
animal,” which, when we look at them through a microscope, are found
to possess nearly the same structure as some lowly organized shells
living in the seas now. These rocks are found in many parts of the
world besides—in Eastern America, Bavaria, Scotland, and Norway; and
in some places their thickness has been estimated at thirty thousand
feet, or nearly six miles, or one hundred times as thick as St. Paul’s
Cathedral is high! These little creatures you see were at work over a
great part of the Earth’s surface, and you may fancy how many thousands
of thousands of years it took them to build up these rocks. The
“life-dawn animal” is far older than the chalk-building foraminifera,
and so far as we know it lived alone in its seas. There were none of
the beautiful twisted _ammonite_ shell-fish, nor the shark-like fishes
of the chalk seas. The eozöon was the only kind of living creature, the
“lord of creation” for the time; and though storms raged in the seas it
inhabited, the water was so deep that it lived on undisturbed. When you
are able to use a microscope you will be able to see the traces left by
these tiny animals in what is now hard stone.[1]
Life began in a very small way: there were none of the great land
animals we have now; but these seemingly insignificant builders were at
work so long that they made the immense rocks I have told you of. But
this is not all. About this time some very simple plants grew on the
land, and were carried down by the rivers and formed deep beds. After
a long time these became covered up with different earths and were
turned into the substance called “black-lead,” which you use in drawing
pencils. But this is not really lead; it is almost pure carbon—in
fact, the oldest kind of coal—so old that it will not now burn like
coal, and is entirely made up of fossil plants crushed out of shape, so
that we cannot now trace their forms, as we can the plants of the coal.
When then you next take up a drawing pencil it will be easy to remember
that the black substance which marks the paper was once a living plant,
now changed by heat and pressure into almost pure carbon. As the name
eozöon has been given to the “life-dawn animal,” I will give this
black-lead the name of _Eodendron_, or the “dawn-plant.”[2]
Two very simple forms of life then occupied the earth and sea at the
earliest time when anything at all was living, and strangely enough we
use the dead bodies of both of them. We build houses of the rocks the
eozöon laid down at the bottom of the sea, and the beautiful art of
drawing is carried on with the carbon from the first plant life of the
world—the eodendron.
I must take you away presently to the coal, and sandstone, and chalk,
and show you how plants and animals gradually increased in number and
size, and fishes began to inhabit the seas, and all living things were
slowly going on to greater perfection; for as time went on there was a
steady progress from creatures like the eozöon, which had scarcely any
power of moving about, to the active, quarrelsome and greedy things
like crabs and lobsters which came after them, and the gigantic ferns
of the coal beds. The peaceful “life-dawn animals” drew their food from
the vegetable substances dissolved in the waters, though they perhaps
also lived on animals still smaller than themselves; but, by-and-by,
creatures, which must have been monsters to them, swarmed in the seas
and devoured their smaller companions wholesale; and in time the Earth
became very much the same as it is now, a place where the struggle for
life is always going on. It is certain that animals have fed upon one
another from the very beginning; but this is no doubt a wise law of the
Creator to prevent them from increasing too fast, as they would do if
all that were born lived, and none were destroyed.
We know much less about the vegetation—the plants and grasses—of the
early ages of the world than of the animals; because plants rot away
faster than bones and shells, and, besides, are less likely to be found
in places where they would be preserved. A dead tree might be eaten up
entirely by insects, as the white ants eat up fallen trees in a short
time in tropical countries, and what is left of them crumbles away to
fine powder and mixes with the soil. Immense trees are thus devoured
now by millions of tiny insects no longer than your thumb nail, in
India and Australia. No such thing as a whole and perfect fossil tree
with every twig and leaf has been found; but then the coal beds are
really great forests which have been buried for so long a time that
they have quite altered in appearance. Still, among these coal beds we
often find the bark, fruit, stems, and branches of trees very much like
firs, and ferns, and huge club-mosses, which have the same shape they
had when living, though they are quite black, and burn exactly like
coal.
But there were plants long before the coal forests lived, and many
fossil sea weeds are found in the old sandstones and limestones in
Wales and other places.[3] The Old Red Sandstone, whose position you
can see below the coal in the table of succession of formations, page
42, does not give us many fossil plants, though fishes and shells are
common. This rock is found in Scotland, Herefordshire, Devonshire, and
Ireland, as well as other places, and is often more than 2,000 feet
thick. It was not all formed in salt water we know, because many of the
fossil fishes and shells it contains are fresh water kinds. It must
all have been made of the pieces of still older rocks worn away by
rivers and settled like a sediment in immense lakes, some of which were
fresh water. Then, after the Old Red Sandstone, came a time when the
limestones below the coal were laid down at the bottom of a vast sea,
and here the remains of land plants are of course few. Then it seems
there must have been a very long time when there were large continents
all over the world raised above the seas, but not very much, and on
these the forests grew which afterwards became coal fields. Until this
time the plants had been mostly water weeds, reeds, rushes, and sea
weeds, and it was not until England and Ireland became one continent,
as they were once and covered with woods, that the great period of
vegetation began.
The growth of plants was then most wonderful; but although coal is
found in many different parts of the world, it was not all formed at
one time, and though it is plentiful in England and Wales, Scotland,
Ireland, France, Belgium, Russia, Hungary, Australia, New Zealand,
China, and Borneo, it is older in some countries than in others. It
is fortunate, however, that this useful material was made in Nature’s
workshop in so many different countries, or it would have to be carried
from one to another. The coal forests were not the same trees as we
have now—oaks, elms, ashes, limes, and so on. Most of them had rather
hollow trunks and splendid waving tops like ferns and reeds, though
there were some like our fir-trees.
If you lie down in the long grass before it is mown, and look through
the stalks and fancy yourself an inch high only, you will have some
idea how the coal forest would have looked if you had lived then.
But there were no human beings on the Earth then, and I do not think
there were any large animals, at least none have been found in the
coal itself, except in Switzerland, where a few bones of the mammoth
(an ancient elephant) and of the rhinoceros have been discovered in
the much newer beds of coal, and also those of a large reptile like a
crocodile in the coal beds of Ohio in America.
[Illustration: II.
_Fossil Tree Fern._
_Calamites._
_Lepidodendron._
_Different Kinds of Plants of the Coal Forests._]
In such immense forests insects must certainly have been plentiful,
and some of the fossil bodies of beetles, dragon-flies, and spiders,
have been preserved, and a few tree lizards.[4] Of course the edges of
the coal forests were washed here and there by the salt sea, and
there must have been some fresh water rivers and ponds, for we find
both fresh and salt water shells in these beds. It was almost dark in
these forests, so thickly did the plants grow together. There were
enormous club-mosses close together and as high as most houses, with
their leaves interlaced making a complete network to shut out the sun.
But the sun which shone on the forests was warm, and the air which went
through them was soft, or they would not have grown so wonderfully.
Indeed, there can be no doubt that the climate of northern regions was
once much warmer than it is now. A thick bed of coal was discovered
by the Arctic Expedition in 1875-6 actually within five hundred miles
of the North Pole, where the ice on the sea is now thirty or forty
feet thick![5] The forest which formed this coal could only have grown
in a temperate climate, and there are no forests there now; it is so
intensely cold they could not live. There must then have been a great
change in the climate of the Arctic regions since that coal was living
vegetation. The few plants and mosses which can live there now are of a
very different and more hardy kind than those of the coal forests.
If you look at the engraving facing page 64, you will see a drawing of
one of the tree ferns with its delicate fronds which grew so abundantly
in the coal forests, and there are many other plants, some like the
common “mare’s tails,” or _calamites_, growing in shallow ponds and
ditches now—only the “mare’s tails” or calamites of the coal forests
were as high as poplars.[6] You can imagine what a splendid sight these
forests of ferns, club-mosses, and “mare’s tails,” must have been, and
what a multitude of beautiful insects and butterflies must have flitted
about in them; but their frail bodies have almost all perished, so that
we know very little of the animated creatures of the time.
Besides several sorts of coal both soft and hard there is a substance
called “lignite,” which is scarcely wood and scarcely coal, of a brown
colour. In fact, lignite is wood almost turned to coal, and it has
helped us to learn that coal was once living wood; but it is not nearly
so old as the coal. Then again there is the beautiful substance called
“jet” used for making bracelets. This is a kind of fossil gum or pitch
dropped from the trees while they were growing, and, though different
in colour, it is much the same in kind as amber. Amber is often found
with flies, spiders, and small leaves imbedded in it. When this fossil
resin or gum was flowing out of the ancient pine-trees, and was quite
sticky, flies settled upon it and became entangled in it, and as more
of the gum flowed out they became quite covered. Then the gum dropped
from the tree and hardened, and it is now found in lumps on the shores
of the Baltic Sea, and in beds of sand and clay with fossil wood. It is
of a beautiful bright yellow colour, and beads for necklaces and other
ornaments are made out of it.
If we arrange the things we have been talking about in order, the
oldest first, they would come thus: plumbago or black-lead—or, as I
have called it, eodendron, “the life-dawn plant”—first, then hard coal,
then soft coal, then lignite and jet, then bog oak and peat. But I
must tell you something about bog oak and peat. In many of the swamps
and bogs of the World the trunks of dead trees are found, which have
become quite black and almost like lignite, because they have been
buried so long. Thus, in the bogs of Ireland oak trees are often found,
and they were most likely living when the reindeer inhabited Ireland.
This old bogwood is made into beads for necklaces and other ornaments.
Peat is a partly decayed vegetable substance, with beautiful little
plants growing on its surface, and is really coal in its infancy. It
is found all over the world more or less in wet places, and consists
of the roots and stems of mosses and reeds, some of which are like
the gigantic plants of the coal period, but very small in comparison.
I have no doubt that in time some of these peat bogs may be turned
into coal if they sink down and become covered with other earths, but
at present they are all on the surface and so soft that they are
dangerous to walk upon because one may sink in and be smothered.
This, as far as we can trace it, is a sketch of the history of
vegetable life on our Earth. We will go back to the coal for a moment
and see what the animal life of that time was. The seas of the time of
the coal forests were sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, and in the
limestone rocks of the oceans which separated the great continents of
that time there is a record of the inhabitants of the seas. The land
plants were of more than 1,000 different kinds, and there were more
than 200 kinds of fishes in the waters, and corals, shells, and small
crab-like animals innumerable. The fishes were fellows with terrible
teeth, and their bodies were covered with strong hard scales. One of
these fish was thirty feet long, and there were others of considerable
size. It is curious that the fishes of this time remind one of reptiles
(lizards and crocodiles), just as the birds of a future time seem to
have something of the reptile about them, as you will see by-and-by.
I dare say you have remarked while reading that all the plants and
animals of the early ages of the world seem to be made on a simple
plan, and as the Earth grows older they become more perfect, and this
is just what I want you to take notice of all through. The plants
of the coal period, you have seen, were nothing like so perfect in
construction, beautiful as they were, as the forest trees of the
present time, neither were the animals so perfect as those living now.
There has been _progress_, step by step, throughout the vegetable and
animal creation; and, though many of the lower forms of the early ages
exist now, there are others far superior to them which did not exist
then: but all this will come in “The Animal Part.”
About the middle of the Earth’s age came the wonderful period of
vegetation which gave us our coal, and after that there was a great and
busy time, when huge reptiles and reptile-like birds, and then true
birds, made their appearance. But that belongs to the next part of the
“puzzle of life.”
If we look with astonishment at the coal forests, we may also well
think of them with thankfulness. Here is the sunshine of past ages
stored up for our use, and we bring it out again to warm ourselves,
cook our food, make all our iron things, and drive our steam-engines!
Can any romance be finer than this, that we are carried across to
America and India and Australia in steam-boats driven by the “fossil
sunlight” of ages and ages past, and whirled along at sixty miles an
hour over iron rails by the same stored-up strength?
If you doubt this, think of living trees. Do they not live by the air
and sunlight? Will they grow without these? They spread their branches
and leaves to gather the warmth and light from the air, and when they
are cut down and dried, and you put a match to the wood, all the old
warmth and light come out again; and we know that the coal is only
fossil wood. Our Creator wastes nothing. Even when there were no people
living to rejoice in the sun, He thought of those people who _should_
come in time, and not one of the fiery rays of the fierce sun was lost.
These mighty forests were sent to gather it, and when they had died
down they sank below the surface and were covered from the air, that
none of their light or heat should escape.
In such forests it is strange that there were no birds, especially as
there were swarms of insects, and no doubt abundance of worms. But no
bone of bird or any trace of feathered songster of these lovely groves
has yet been found. Little lizards chased flies and beetles up and down
the stems of the club-mosses and ferns, and larger reptiles lurked in
the long damp grass under the shade. The pools and ponds were filled
with curious fishes, and reefs of beautiful white coral fringed all the
shores of the seas.
But the Earth was not fit for the habitation of man. The fruits of the
trees were not such as he could have eaten, and their wood was not hard
enough to build houses of. Still it was being got ready for him, and
not a leaf waved uselessly in the bright, warm air, and not a tree fell
to the ground, but it was to be turned into coal, and to come forth
again one day a hard black lump, without any of its former beauty, but
to give back the light and heat it had gathered from the sun ages and
ages ago.
Many periods in the Earth’s history have passed since the coal period,
and in every one of these the trees have been increasing in perfection,
though there have never since been such great numbers of a few kinds
growing. When we come to the more lately formed beds of earth we begin
to find the cypress, willow, ash, oak, elm, and other forest trees
which are living now. The trunks of these trees, blackened by age, lie
buried in peat bogs and swamps all over Europe. The mighty Mississippi
river brings down immense quantities of dead trees, and as these sink
to the bottom near its mouth they are forming future coal beds. Along
the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, too, and stretching far away under
the German Ocean, is an old English forest. In some places the trunks
of the buried trees may be seen standing upright just where they grew.
The nets of the fishermen are continually bringing up pieces of wood,
roots, and seeds; and when the sea washes away the soft cliffs here the
bones, teeth, and tusks of the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and
other large animals which inhabited this forest, may be seen in great
numbers.
Down below the waves of ocean have these woods sunk with all their once
living creatures, and though you may suppose that it must have been
very long ago that they grew, they are of the same kind as those which
now make the hills and valleys of England beautiful.
Sometimes a forest must sink very fast, for travellers have told us how
they have sailed on rivers and lakes over the tops of sunken trees,
and, looking down into the clear water, have seen the branches waving
below—tall trees standing upright at the bottom, and the boats sailing
over their tops!
We must now pass on to the living creatures which peopled the Earth,
and their story can be told with more certainty than that of the
perishable plants which clothed the surface of the ground, and, while
they rendered it beautiful, also served as food and shelter for
innumerable animals, and have become so useful to us as coal, lignite,
black-lead, and other productions of ancient forests.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Specimen in Table-case 15, Room V., North Gallery British Museum.
[2] The name _Eophyton_ has also been suggested for the earliest
vegetable forms.
[3] Divisions A and B of Case 1, Room I., North Gallery, contain some
of the oldest known fossil plants.
[4] Fossil insects in Table-case No. 14, Room V.
[5] In 81° 44′ N. latitude.
[6] Specimens of plants from the coal in Cases No. 2, 3, 4, in Room I.
_THE ANIMAL PART._
We must now go back and collect the smaller pieces of “the puzzle”
which make up the animal part. The great periods of vegetation ended in
our country with the coal forests, and there has been no such wonderful
growth of plants since the time when the New Red Sandstone, lying above
the coal, was formed; though no doubt trees and plants have since
flourished, as they do now on the Earth, but not in such quantities as
during the coal period.
We remember that the eozöon, “the life-dawn animal,” is the oldest
animal we know of, and that it lived so long ago as when the Laurentian
rocks were laid down at the bottom of the seas of that time; then in
later rocks we find the burrows of sea worms in the stone, and later
still simple shells with two valves like the common mussel, and other
animals of a simple kind, like the corals, sponges, and star-fishes
which exist now. There must have been millions of these creatures in
the older limestone seas, for the rocks are almost entirely composed
of their fossil shells and bodies. By-and-by a rather superior animal
inhabited the seas of Wales, called a trilobite, of which you will see
a picture on the opposite page. This curious animal was of the same
family as the shrimps and prawns, but much larger, and he must have
been a giant among the others. None of these animals had any bones, you
must understand; but they had a hard shelly covering to support their
soft bodies inside, and no doubt the trilobites were able to swim about
very fast.[7]
[Illustration: III.
_Trilobite._]
What I want you to take notice of now is the _progress_ that has been
going on from the almost motionless eozöon to the shell-fish and
star-fish, which could crawl along the bottom of the sea and over the
rocks, to this active, quick-moving trilobite, with his great paddles.
Then the next step is a very great one, when we come to animals with
bones. The first of these are fishes. All the other bones are joined to
the backbone, therefore all animals with bones are called _vertebrata_,
which is a Latin word meaning having a backbone with joints. Now
animals with bones are plainly superior to those with only shells, and
when we find fishes among the rocks of Wales and Devonshire we know
that we are beginning to pick up some important pieces of the “puzzle
of life.” These fishes were most of them related to the sturgeon, and
their bones and teeth are found in great quantities in the Old Red
Sandstone rocks, just below the coal.[8]
It is not until we get above the coal into the oolite or egg-stone
rocks that still larger and altogether superior animals, both of sea
and land, began to increase, and this is called
THE AGE OF REPTILES.
This has been called the reptile age because there were such numbers
of animals like crocodiles, lizards, and tortoises (which are all
reptiles), and some of them were of immense size. For instance, there
was a huge creature something like a frog, but as large as a Shetland
pony, called the _Labyrinthodon_, with a great many curious teeth, and
this animal has left footprints in the New Red Sandstone which have
been dried and buried, we can’t tell how long, and there are the cracks
made by the sun drying the place he walked over when that was soft
earth. There is a drawing of some of these footsteps in the picture on
the next page, and there are also the footprints of a large bird, and
you can see where he walked over the soft earth and made a long line of
footmarks; and if you look at the footprints of birds on the snow or
mud now you will notice marks just like these. Then there is another
picture of a single footprint of a large bird, and all those round dots
are where rain-drops fell and left their marks in the soft earth.
[Illustration: IV.
(1) _Footprints of Labyrinthodon._
(3) _Footprints of Birds_, (2) _with marks of Rain-drops_.]
I dare say you will wonder how it is that these footprints have not
disappeared. Well, when the animals and birds that made them had
gone the marks became filled with dry sand, no doubt blown in by the
wind, and then the mud dried hard, and at last it became covered with
other earths and sank slowly down, just as the coal forests had done
before, and remained there until we dug it up with these tracks of
the birds and animals that lived then. Some of these birds must have
been larger than any living now, because their footmarks are so long.
None of their bones have been found yet, I believe, but plenty of the
teeth and some bones of the labyrinthodon have. The real footmarks, of
course, are very large, though they are small in the picture.[9]
In the great beds of Lias there are many other strange animals, and
among them are two great fish-lizards called the _Ichthyosaurus_
and _Plesiosaurus_. Both of these lived in the water and perhaps
came on land sometimes, and it is certain that they must have been
very ferocious creatures, from their great size and sharp teeth. The
plesiosaurus would be able to raise his long neck above the water and
snap at some of those curious birds rather like bats which lived at the
time, and of which I shall have something to say presently. Some of
these fish-lizards were as large as whales, and their bodies have been
so beautifully preserved in the limestone rocks that we can actually
sometimes find in their stomachs the food they lived on.
[Illustration: V.
_Ichthyosaurus._
_Plesiosaurus._
FISH-REPTILES.]
Now we have got to a higher order of creation still, these
fish-lizards, and they remind one of the next step in progress—birds.
You know that all birds lay eggs, so do almost all reptiles, such as
crocodiles, lizards, and most snakes, so that they are alike in this.
Then the plesiosaurus with his long neck reminds us of such birds as
the heron and the swan, but he is altogether more like a reptile than
either a fish or a bird. There were also huge land reptiles, which
lived in the forests of the time, and must have been a terror to the
smaller animals. From the bones of one of these which have been found
in the oolite clays near Weymouth in Dorsetshire (the _Cetiosaurus_),
we see that it must have been nearly as large as an elephant, and
there are others called the _Megalosaurus_, _Dinosaurus_, &c. All these
names end with _saurus_, a name taken from the Greek word meaning
lizard; and you will see now why the oolite, or “Jurassic”[10] age,
as it is sometimes called, is well named the “reptile age,” for these
creatures swarmed on the land and in the sea. Specimens of these you
can see for yourselves in the cases on the walls of the third room in
the North Gallery of the British Museum, where all the fossils are
collected.
But still more extraordinary animals than any of these lived at the
time, and we can scarcely tell whether they were birds or reptiles, as
they were something like both, but I suppose we must call them flying
reptiles, and they are the nearest approach to birds that had yet
existed. These creatures are called _Pterodactyles_, from two Greek
words which mean “wing-fingered.” Suppose the little fingers of both
your hands were a yard longer than the others, and suppose a thick
leathery skin was stretched from the tips of your long little fingers
to each of your feet, you would have wings something like a pterodactyl
and also something like the wings of a bat. But the pterodactyl had a
long neck and a long beak-like mouth, full of long sharp pointed teeth.
It could not walk much I think, but it could hang itself up by its hind
limbs to a tree or rock, head downwards like a bat, and must have been
able to fly very strongly, with its huge leathery wings, but it had no
feathers. There were swarms of these curious half lizard half bird-like
animals on the land, and they were of all sizes, some no bigger than a
crow, and some as large as the albatross, measuring twelve feet across
their outstretched wings. Their skeletons are some of the commonest
fossils in the oolite rocks, all through the great reptile age.[11]
Now you see we have come to a reptile that can fly, but, excepting for
its wings and some of its bones, more like a crocodile than a bird. A
little further on we find another curious animal in the oolite rocks,
which is much more like a true bird than the pterodactyl, because it
had feathered wings. It is called the _Archæopteryx_, which means
“ancient wing,” and I have given a picture of it on the same page as
the pterodactyl, so that you may compare them together. The blade-bone
and “merry-thought” of this creature were exactly like those of a bird,
and so were the feet and legs, which would enable it to walk easily, or
perch on the branch of a tree, but the tail was long and many-jointed
like that of a lizard, with a fan of feathers growing on each side
of it, and short feathered wings. Then it most likely had teeth like
a lizard, and there were short claws at the bend of the wings. This
bird-reptile was about the size of a crow, and was the first we know of
with feathers, and the limestone rock has preserved it most beautifully
through all the long ages which have passed since it flitted over the
land of the oolite period.[12] Later still than these, there lived in
America, about the time the chalk was formed in England, two strange
birds called _Hesperornis_ and _Ichthyornis_, both of which had teeth
in the jaws. The former was an immense fellow like the penguin, with
short wings, and the latter was about the size of a pigeon with large
feathered wings.
They are finding more of these curious creatures every now and then in
America. Some are without teeth, and have a horny bill like that of a
real bird, and in other ways more nearly resemble living birds; still
they have not lost the appearance of reptiles in their principal bones.
[Illustration: VI.
_Pterodactyl_ (_Wing-finger_).
_Archæopteryx_ (_Ancient-wing_).]
I have been particular in describing some of these fish-lizards
and bird-reptiles; because they, or their near relations, were the
principal inhabitants of land and sea from the end of the coal period
to the end of the chalk, though there were of course swarms of fishes
and shell-fish; but I ought to tell you that even so early as this
there was at least one animal known which suckled its young ones, and
this was a small insect-eating creature not larger than a rat, of the
same family (called _Marsupial_) as the kangaroo of Australia, which
carries its young ones in a pocket or pouch in its skin.
All this time we have been hunting for parts of “the puzzle” in those
ancient oolite rocks between the coal and the chalk, and those we
have found are very important. We have seen the slow progress from
simple sea shells to simple fishes, and then onwards to fish-lizards
and bird-reptiles with one little marsupial animal, of a far higher
kind, in between, as if to tell us beforehand what more complete and
perfect animals we might expect by-and-by. After the fishes we have
found fish-lizards, then bird-reptiles with wings, but no feathers, and
later still a bird-reptile with wing and tail feathers. How different
the life of the Earth was at the end of the “reptile age” of the oolite
rocks, to the far back Laurentian time when one little creature, our
old friend eozöon, alone held possession of the seas!
THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD.
Now let us look into the rocks next above, and see what is to be found
there. We have arrived in the Cretaceous period, or time when the
chalk was formed.[13] You remember I told you you might call this
“foraminifera earth” because so much of it was made up of the shells
of these tiny animals, thousands of which could be put into a thimble.
Whenever you make a mark with a piece of drawing chalk you rub off a
number of them, and you will see what pretty little creatures they
were if you look at the drawings of some of them on the next page as
they are seen under the microscope, magnified thousands of times their
natural size; but there are others of different shapes. On the same
page too there is a handsome shell, called an ammonite, and of its real
size, common in chalk rocks. The seas of the time must have been very
deep as I have explained before, and the chalk contains numbers of
bones of fishes everywhere, and many of the remains of the reptile-like
creatures of the time before. Corals, sea-urchins, crabs, &c.,
abounded, and as you can scarcely ever see chalk without immense flint
stones in it, you may suppose what millions of sponges lived on the
rocks, for these flints are partly made up of their fossil bodies.[14]
Another Cretaceous period is beginning now at the bottom of the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, where it is deep enough to cover the Alps,
for these little foraminifera are living on the surface in countless
millions, and day by day their fossil shells are settling down to the
bottom and forming a soft grey mud, full of the carbonate of lime like
chalk. The climate of the Cretaceous age was mild and pleasant, as we
know from the kind of animals in the seas. Slowly the water began to
get shallower and shallower by the upheaval of the bed, and at last the
bottom of this mighty chalk ocean came up to the light and sun, to be
covered in some places with the drift and worn particles of older rocks
swept over it by rivers, and to receive new plants and new animals, and
in some places to remain almost bare, as it is on the downs of Brighton.
[Illustration: VII.
FOSSILS OF THE CHALK.
1 _Ammonite._
2 3 4 _Foraminifera_ (_Chalk-builders_).]
Now we take one more step upwards into almost a new world—the world on
which mighty animals lived, and which man came to share with them.
THE TERTIARY PERIOD.
The reign of the reptiles is now passed. The ichthyosaurus and
pterodactyl no longer inhabited the seas and continents. Great changes
had taken place in the shape of the land. A river larger than the Rhine
swept majestically through England from the borders of Wales right out
into the German Ocean, and its banks were covered with forests and
marshes, where the new animals which had come to take possession of
the earth lived and moved and had their being. The mountains of the
Pyrenees were raised above the sea, and parts of Surrey and Sussex
appeared too. It was most likely in the early part of the Tertiary
period that the stone was formed of which almost all Paris is built.
Fancy a great city built of the shells of dead animals! One can
scarcely believe it: but the microscope lets us into this secret of
Nature. If we take a piece of this stone and examine it in a powerful
microscope we see that it is made almost entirely of tiny shells, so
small that myriads of them could be packed in a nut-shell. How long
must they have been working to make all the stone beds of which Paris
is built? We cannot measure the time, we can only know it must have
been enormous!
All kinds of animals both of sea and land increased in numbers and
perfection. The ammonites were dead, but their even more beautiful
relation, the nautilus, was living as it is now. The trilobite was
gone, but his next relation, the lobster and crab, appeared. Fishes
abounded. Whales which suckle their young ones appeared, and the
numbers of vertebrata, or animals with backbones, were more numerous
than they had ever been before. Just as animals with bones are more
perfect than those with only skins or shells, so animals which suckle
their young ones are more perfect than those which only lay eggs.
Thus the whale is a more perfect animal than the shark, though both
inhabit the water; and elephants and even rats and mice more perfect
still; and because there were so many of these “sucklers,” or mammalia
as they are called, in the Tertiary period, we know that all living
creatures were becoming more perfect. It will interest you too to learn
that monkeys began to appear now, and that they were common in France,
while at the present time the only part of Europe where they are to be
found is on the rock of Gibraltar.
But I want particularly to tell you of the giant animals—the Mammoth,
Mastodon, Megatherium, Dinotherium, and others, and first let us see
what the mammoth was like.
In former times, when people accidentally found the bones of these
animals, they actually thought they had belonged to giant _men_, and
we can scarcely wonder at that: but we know better. If only one small
bone is shown to Professor Owen or Professor Huxley, he can tell at
once whether it belonged to a man or an animal, a fish or a bird, and
very often the particular animal too. Well, the bones of the mammoth
were found in the north of Russia on the banks of the river Lena in
1800: but the Russians knew of them before that, and the name they
gave the animal means “earth,” because they supposed it burrowed in the
earth like a mole. This one is now in the Museum at St. Petersburg, and
its brownish coat and long black hairs, and even the hoofs and some of
the flesh, can be distinctly seen. The drawing in the frontispiece is
taken from it. It was strange that any people could have supposed that
this huge creature, larger than an elephant and with great curved tusks
ten feet long and weighing 160 lbs., could have got underground of its
own accord: but that was the only way in which they could account for
finding it buried in the earth on the banks of the rivers. Look at
the picture in the frontispiece; what a splendid animal he was, this
old elephant; larger and stronger than any living elephants! Immense
quantities of their bones are found in Siberia, and the tusks and teeth
are brought in ship-loads to England, where they are sold for their
ivory. Their skeletons have been found in most countries of Europe, in
many parts of Asia, and in North America, and these animals must have
been common at one time near London, for their bones have been dug up
in the brick earth at Ilford in Essex and other places near the Thames.
There is a skull with tusks set up with iron supports in the British
Museum.[15]
There was besides another animal very much like this called the
Mastodon; but it had tusks in the lower jaws as well as the upper,
four in all, and the lower tusks dropped out when the animal grew old.
The whole skeleton of one of these is also put up in the Museum, which
you ought to go and see.[16] Mastodons’ bones have been discovered in
England and other parts of Europe, and in North and South America and
India, so that they were spread pretty well all over the world. They
had very curious pointed teeth rather like a lot of fir cones piled
together, not flat grinders like those of the mammoth and all living
elephants, and perhaps they fed upon fruits and nuts, and boughs, as
I do not think they could have managed well to chew grass and leaves
with such pointed teeth. The teeth in their old dead jaws are still
beautifully white and look like china. Both the mammoth and the
mastodon had long trunks of course, and they must have been grand
looking creatures marching about in the English forests. We should be
very much startled if we were to meet one of them now in an English
wood: but there is no chance of that, they have all passed away, and
the only relations they have living are the elephants of Africa and
Asia.
During this Tertiary period, or at least the early part of it, besides
the mammoth and mastodon, the hippopotamus and rhinoceros were
plentiful about the Thames. Those same Ilford marshes in Essex have
been a complete storehouse of the remains of these animals. The bones
of a hundred different mammoths and eighty rhinoceroses have been dug
up lately from the damp, black soil, as well as many belonging to the
hippopotamus, and we can have no doubt that all the swamps along the
north side of the river were inhabited by large herds of these huge
beasts, or so many of their skeletons could not have been collected in
one place. It is very likely they were overtaken in a flood of the
river and drowned, and their bodies sank down in the mud of the river
bank: but anyhow, there they are to tell us that they lived and died
almost within sight of the Tower of London, if it had been built then,
as of course it was not.
[Illustration: VIII.
_Gigantic Irish Stag_ (_Cervus Megaceros_).]
Long long ago too, before there was a single brick where London stands,
and when the few human beings who were living were obliged to hide
themselves in caves, great lions might have been heard roaring at night
in the forests of the Thames Valley. The bones of this lion have been
found in many different parts of England, and a terrible fellow he
must have been, for some of his canine teeth (the long sharp teeth in
cats and dogs) were more than six inches long. Indeed they were like
small swords, and this is why he has been called the “sabre-toothed”
lion. There were also bears, like the great grisly bear of America, and
leopards, hyenas, and wolves, and besides two kinds of ox far larger
than those we have now. But one of the handsomest animals was the great
Irish stag. When standing upright the top of his horns would be as
high as two tall men. He was indeed a fine fellow with his immense
spreading antlers. The deer in our parks would look dwarfs beside him.
He inhabited both England and Ireland: but, being found more often in
Ireland, he has got the name of the _Irish_ stag. As many as thirty of
the skeletons of these stags have been found together under a bog in
Ireland, and in some of the bones the marrow is still preserved, and
they burn well. Fences have been made of these bones in Ireland, and
when the people of a small village in the county of Antrim heard of the
battle of Waterloo they made a great bonfire of the bones and horns
of the Irish stag to rejoice over the victory. I dare say these stags
were hunted by wolves, and perhaps driven on to the ice of ancient
lakes, where they broke through and got drowned, for so many of their
skeletons are found together. I could not pass this magnificent stag by
without giving you a picture of him.[17] He was a much nobler looking
animal than the reindeer, which lived along with him at the time in
England, and from his appearance I should say he was a swift runner and
great fighter. Some antlers have been found locked together, just as
these stags died in mortal combat, and I never see Sir Edwin Landseer’s
beautiful picture of two red-deer stags fighting without thinking what
a grand sight it would have been to see two of these great Irish stags
rushing at each other with their powerful horns.
Not one of those animals is living now, and none of them is mentioned
in any history or tradition whatever, and though there is no doubt that
men living in Europe saw the mammoth alive (as you will find in the
next chapter), they knew of no kind of writing in which to tell us of
them; these fossils are the only records left, but they speak plainly
enough of the time when England and the whole of Europe were inhabited
by these races of huge animals.
[Illustration: IX.
_The Megatherium._]
Now I must carry you away to South America, where there are more
wonders. If I were to tell you of all the singular monsters people
have found in the beds of the rivers there it would make a book of
itself. You know what large rivers there are in that country, and how
they run for thousands of miles through almost flat plains called
“Pampas.” Well, these rivers have often changed their beds by cutting
new channels in the soft soil. The old dry beds of the rivers are
the burying-places of some most curious animals, but I have not room
to tell you about more than one of them at present. He is called the
_Megatherium_, which means “great beast.” His size and strength were
enormous. The largest hippopotamus looks small by his side. His leg
bones are bigger than your body. He was more like the sloth than any
other living animal, but he could not climb. He stood on those huge,
broad hind feet, with his strong tail as a sort of third leg, and tore
down the branches of the trees to feed on, or even rooted them up to
get at the leaves. Standing by his skeleton in the British Museum[18]
one feels quite a shrimp, and he looks strong enough to walk away
comfortably with an elephant on his back.
Another immense animal inhabited South America at the time, which
geologists have called _Dinotherium_, or “dreadful beast.”[19] He was a
relation of the mastodon, but his tusks were very curious. Instead of
being in the upper jaw and turned upwards they stuck out from the lower
jaw and curved downwards, giving him a very odd appearance. He most
probably had a trunk like the mammoth or mastodon, but perhaps not so
long. All these of course were vegetable feeders.
The Tertiary period is so remarkable for the numbers of animals more
or less related to elephants and spread all over the world, that we
might almost call it the “elephant age,” as the oolite has been named
the “reptile age.” These elephantine animals abounded in Europe, Asia,
and North and South America, and though none of this kind have yet been
found in Australia and Africa, I cannot help thinking they will be
discovered in Africa at all events, for there is no doubt that Africa
and Europe were once joined.
Australia you know possesses that animal so unlike all others that when
we first see it we are quite astonished—the kangaroo. The bones of a
huge fossil kangaroo have been found in Australia which must have stood
fourteen or fifteen feet high I should think when on its hind legs, or
more than twice as large as any living now.[20] Then there were giant
birds in New Zealand (something like the ostrich) called _dinornis_ or
“dreadful bird.” These fellows had no wings, and they must have been
very much taller than the ostrich or emu. To look at their leg bones
you would think they were the bones of oxen instead of birds, they are
so immensely thick and strong. I do not think any of these are living
now, because they have been sought for carefully, and none of the
natives even can say that they have seen one. But their skeletons are
common in the surface earth, and their bones, cracked to get the marrow
out of them, are often dug out of the heaps of refuse collected about
ancient cooking places. So that they were used for food, and perhaps
they have not been extinct—that is to say, died out—more than a few
hundred years; and this is more likely because feathers are sometimes
attached to the remains, and undecayed sinews on the feet. A human
skeleton has been found in a grave in New Zealand, too, with the egg
of one between its arms, and little piles of pebbles are often seen
among their bones, where the stomach would be, which the bird swallowed
to digest its food, just as many birds do now. The natives called
it the Moa, and they have some traditions about it, and, all things
considered, it is probably one of the most recent fossil animals, and
that is the reason why I have left it to the last.[21]
Now I dare say you will wish to know when the animals living now took
the place of those I have described, and which have all passed away.
This cannot be told with certainty, but you will see in the “Human
Part” that Men were living when the mammoth, mastodon, and some other
extinct animals, inhabited the Earth, and that the reindeer, ox, bear,
wolf, hyena, &c., have survived to the present day.
Throughout these immense periods of time there are gaps which we cannot
yet fill up. No one can yet say, for instance, when the last of the
mammoths disappeared, and the first of their near relations, the Indian
and African elephants, took their place. These are the missing parts
of “the puzzle of life” which you may perhaps one of these days find
when you come to study the subject, and when you have learned all that
is known at present. But you may be sure of this, that throughout all
time there has been _progress_, the lower forms of animal life have
been followed by more perfect forms as the Earth grew older. It is true
the lower forms of life have not all died out. These imperfect animals
have run through all the ages—the chalk builder of the Cretaceous age
lives in the ocean now—and there are many other simple animals which
lived in Old Red Sandstone times, and are not extinct yet, but wherever
a superior kind of animal has passed away another more perfect has
taken its place. This will be seen at once if we compare the “Reptile
Age” with the Tertiary. The great ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and
pterodactyl are gone, but now we have the more perfect crocodiles
and birds. The mammoth is gone, but we have the elephant. There are
no giant mosses or towering tree ferns, but our forest trees are more
perfect and more varied. The plants which formed the coal forests and
once clothed the Earth with beauty have dwindled away to the lowly
forms which we must stoop to examine in swamps, and these humble plants
are all the surviving relatives of their once noble family. The lordly
oaks and elms, stronger, and even more lovely in the sweet drapery of
their foliage, and much better fitted for our use, have succeeded all
those soft-stemmed plants which grew so fast and were the best possible
kind for forming coal.
When you are able to study what is called comparative anatomy you will
see how wonderful the _plan_ of creation is, and how beautifully it
has been worked out by its great Designer. You will see in the bones
of the reptiles of the oolite rocks a prophecy as it were of the birds
and animals which were to come. What could be more prophetic of animals
with the power of perfect flight than the leather-winged pterodactyl,
half lizard and half bird? In some of these animals you will see bones
only half formed, and useless to that creature, which were brought to
perfection in later times, and became the most important part of the
body.
It is very difficult for me to make all this plain to you, but if you
are really interested in it you will go to a museum where the fossils
are collected, and then I am very much mistaken if you do not find a
new and strange world opened to you.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Numerous specimens in Case No. 7, Room V.
[8] Specimens of fossil fishes from various rocks in Wall-case No. 1,
Room II.
[9] See examples in the large Wall-cases in Rooms I., II., and III.,
North Gallery.
[10] So called because the mountain chain of the Jura Alps was raised
during this period.
[11] Several specimens in Room III., and in Table-case No. 16, Room IV.
[12] Wall-case No. 11 in Room III., several specimens, imperfect.
[13] From the Latin word “creta,” meaning chalk.
[14] Ammonites in the Table-cases in Rooms V. and VI. For enlarged
models of foraminifera, see Case No. 15 in Room V.
[15] Room VI., North Gallery.
[16] In the same room.
[17] Complete specimens of male and female in the middle of Room V.
[18] Room VI.
[19] Head and tusks in Wall-case No. 2, Room VI.
[20] Skull in Wall-case No. 1, Room VI.
[21] Several specimens in Wall-case No. 11, Room III.
_THE HUMAN PART._
The history of the human race is of course even more interesting than
that of the plants and animals which lived so long before man and
prepared the way for him, because man is the “crown of creation.”
When first placed on this Earth he must have been but little superior
to the animals in his outward life, though he had very different powers
within him. He could gather the fruits of the Earth like them, and
perhaps used some of the smaller creatures as food, but he could do
little more. He scarcely knew that he possessed the faculties which
would in time make him lord of the Earth and the creatures inhabiting
it. By slow and painful experience he was to gather those stores of
knowledge that were to enable him to overcome difficulties, to provide
him with shelter from the weather and protection from dangerous
animals, give increasing comfort and power, and set him so far above
all other created things. He found plants and animals for his use, and
the dwellings in caves and holes ready made by Nature. He could neither
build houses nor make weapons. The first weapon he ever used probably
was a stone, which he could throw at small animals. Then he would find
out that long, sharp-pointed sticks could be thrown like spears, and
he also found that a long pliant piece of wood when bent would fly
back, and in this he would see a means of throwing smaller pointed
sticks like arrows, and I dare say the discovery of the way of making
a bow with a string of twisted animal skin was a great invention, and
it certainly would be a very valuable one. Many generations must have
passed away before he got even as far as this. It is very easy for us,
who see bows and arrows from our childhood, to understand their use at
once: but the first human inhabitants of the world had to find them out
for themselves. They began with _no_ knowledge at all. The beasts of
the field and the fruits of the Earth were given them, but they could
MAKE nothing. They had not even the natural covering of hair, or wool,
or feathers, which animals and birds have, and they must first have
clothed themselves with skins of these. The wants of their daily life
were so great that they had no time to think of anything else, but
when it became easier to satisfy these bodily wants their minds turned
to other things. They must have seen that when the seeds and fruits
of plants fall upon the ground they grow and produce the same kind of
plant, but they did not at first think of gathering a great number of
these seeds and sowing them in one place and making a garden. They
could wander about and gather all they needed as they became ripe, for
there were few people then. Their life was like that of the lilies of
the field, they “toiled not neither did they spin,” as Christ says of
the flowers, but when they began to increase in number something more
was wanted. People began to feel something within them which we call
“intellect,” and this must be satisfied. It was not enough to live as
if they were no nobler than the animals. Something stirred in their
minds which told them they must not stand still.
The Creator has made both us and the wood and stone and metals, and
has given to us the power to make other things out of them. Thus we
are nearer to Him in power than any of the animals who cannot change
the rough materials into other forms. We admire the simple and really
beautiful nest of the bird, but we feel that our power is greater
when we consider our splendid buildings and steam-engines, our ships,
and our many conquests over difficulties. But if we did not use these
greater powers of mind and hand well, we should find them grow weaker
and weaker until we might almost lose them.
You may easily suppose that there was a time when men could not write,
and there were no books of any kind, nor any other means of exchanging
thoughts except through spoken language. The earliest histories about
the human race always speak of men who lived before those histories
were written. We have nothing about the earliest men written by
_themselves_. It is always someone else who writes of them, referring
to their deeds, and to events which happened long before.
The art of writing has grown up gradually and very slowly, for when the
inhabitants of the Earth became numerous they felt the need of some
way of expressing themselves to those at a distance from them, and for
making a record of things that happened and might be forgotten. Some
of the earliest means of writing were by pictures, like the picture
writings of Mexico[22] found by the Spanish conquerors, and something
of the same kind is even now used by the Chinese and Japanese. Their
writing is made up partly of pictures and partly of queer signs which
stand for the names of things, as you know if you have ever seen
one of their books. One of the oldest forms of writing known is the
hieroglyphic, which is said to have been first used by the Egyptians
about 2,100 years before Christ, and another is the arrow-shaped
writing of the Assyrians. These were cut on stone and metal tablets,
and most of them are the histories of their kings. But there are some
writings on stone in India which are thought to be older still. The
Egyptians made great progress in writing afterwards when _papyrus_
was invented.[23] This is a kind of paper made from a reed which grows
abundantly in the river Nile, and many of these papyrus writings are
preserved in the British Museum, as well as the writings on stone of
the Egyptians and Assyrians, and learned men have spelled out a great
deal of the history of these nations from them, though the language is
quite different from any spoken or written now.
Picture writing was most likely one of the earliest inventions in this
way: but it was so troublesome that signs were used to express the same
things as the picture. For instance, suppose a history of a king was to
be written. The word “king” would be shown by something he always wore,
such as his crown, and this sign would become more simple until at last
it might not be anything like a crown; but it would be remembered that
the sign stood for a king all the same. The first letter of the Hebrew
alphabet, _aleph_, means an ox, and the letter is something like the
shape of the head of that animal with its horns; and another letter,
called _shin_, which in Hebrew means a tooth, is actually very like a
tooth with three points. In many languages these signs have become so
altered that they do not now resemble the things they at first stood
for; but the first steps in the invention of written language were
certainly made by signs representing the thing of which the person
wished to give an idea. But you will learn all about these ancient
writings from other books.
The men whose lives I am going to describe lived long before any of
these writings were invented. They _spoke_ a language of course, though
there is nothing left to show that they knew of any kind of writing,
and they are called Pre-historic men because they lived before there
were any histories either written by themselves or about them. But they
could draw a little, as we know from the pictures of animals, birds,
and fishes scratched upon pieces of slate, and bone, and stone found in
their graves. Perhaps these pictures were memorials of their great or
wise men, or showed that they were clever hunters, or fishermen.
They knew the use of fire. Half burnt bones and wood and ashes are
plentiful in the caves where they lived. They had none of the means we
possess for kindling fire, and there are only two ways by which they
could have got it. They might have rubbed two pieces of very dry wood
together until the heat lighted them, as many savages do at the present
time; or they might have struck sparks from flint upon rotten wood and
blown the spark into a flame. We may be sure that when once a fire was
lighted they would take care it did not go out, and if they wanted to
travel they would carry with them a piece of smouldering wood to light
the fire again. I do not suppose that these pre-historic men were any
more civilized than the savages of Australia and other countries, and
I have often thought when looking at these savages that they live in
almost exactly the same way as the earliest inhabitants of Europe did.
They have the same shaped weapons and tools made of stone, and these
are fixed to the handles in the same way. They have the same kinds of
needles and fish-hooks made of bone, and they sew skins together with
threads made from the sinews of animals. Thus we see men living now
in many parts of the world who are quite as uncivilized as the old
inhabitants of Europe, who lived perhaps thousands of years before the
Egyptians and Assyrians.
These very ancient men knew nothing about metals. All their tools were
made of flint, or bone, or stone, and they were of the rough shape you
see in the pictures on the next page, and it is for this reason that
this has been called the _Stone Age_. These were chipped out with great
trouble and labour, and most of them were not even polished. With these
they had to kill animals for food, to cut down trees, and fight against
their enemies. The skeleton of a mastodon was found in the state of
Missouri in America about thirty-five years ago with numbers of these
flint arrow-heads underneath and near it. Perhaps it had been shot at
with arrows, and when it died the flint points fell out of its decaying
flesh. But it is not likely that these pre-historic men could have
killed many such large animals, unless they caught them in pits covered
over with branches of trees and earth, into which they might fall,
as elephants are sometimes caught in Africa.
[Illustration: X.
1. _Flint Arrow-head._
2. _Stone Axe in handle._
3. _Flint Knife._
4. _Bone Harpoon._
5. _Bone Needles._
6. _Sceptre made of Horn._
7. _Marrow Spoon._]
Nothing shows us so well the immense time which must have passed since
the men of the stone age lived as that these flint weapons and tools
are found nearly all over the world, in Northern Europe, including
our own country, in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Palestine, Africa,
Japan, America, &c.; and yet none of the present inhabitants of these
countries have any history or tradition of the time when they were
used. Metals are now used instead, and there is no record of the time
when flint only was known. We are quite certain however that the stone
age men lived at the same period as the great animals of the Tertiary
age, the mammoth, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, the Irish stag,
the cave bear, and others you have read of in former chapters, because
flint and stone weapons are found in the same beds of earth with these
animals.[24]
Suppose one of the present Indian or African elephants with his rider
were to fall into a river and they were to sink to the bottom and be
covered with mud, and suppose his rider had in his pocket some of our
sovereigns. If that elephant should be accidentally dug up thousands of
years to come, when most likely all elephants will have died off the
earth, people would know for certain, from the date and figure of the
Queen on the money, that elephants were used by the English in this
reign, even if all our books and monuments had perished, and a new
people inhabited the Earth. Something of the same kind has happened to
prove to us that the stone-age men saw the mammoth alive. In one of
their graves there is a slice of a mammoth’s great back tooth with a
beautiful picture of the animal, with his bristly hair, scratched on
the ivory, and there are also many of the flint and stone weapons which
show that the skeleton in the grave was that of a primeval man. This
little picture tells its tale more faithfully than any history. It is
all the more certain to tell it truly because it was never _meant_ to
tell one. When that man was buried with this sign that he was a mighty
hunter of the mammoth, or an artist, no one could imagine that he would
ever be dug up to show us, who come so long afterwards, that he saw the
mammoth roaming through the forests of the far away past. There can be
no doubt that it is a very good drawing of the mammoth with its long
turned-up tusks, like those in the picture at the beginning of the book.
In another place a picture of a fight between some reindeer scratched
upon a piece of slate has been found. This was in a cave in France,
and it, as well as the numbers of bones of these animals in the caves,
shows that the reindeer, which now only inhabits the Arctic regions,
must have been common then in France. You will see drawings of both
these on page 135.
These primeval people built no houses. They lived in natural caves, and
scattered the remains of their food about the floor, so that we know
what they ate. Among the animals they used for food were the horse,
the reindeer, the ox, the cave-lion and bear, the wolf, the hyena, the
goat, the hare and several others, besides salmon and other fish. They
were very fond of the marrow of the bones, which they cracked with
stone hammers, and had little spoons made of bone with which to pick it
out.
They had places for making flint weapons too. At Cissbury Camp, near
Worthing, there is one of their old workshops. There are galleries dug
into the chalk where they got the flints, and there are thousands of
chips of flint lying about, with half finished arrow-heads, and some
of the tools they dug with. They had no spades or pickaxes; but they
used the broad, flat, shoulder-blade bone of the ox as a spade, and the
sharp brow antler of a deer’s horn for a pickaxe, to get these flints
out with. It must have been very hard work for them, because bone
spades and horn pickaxes would soon wear out, and would not be nearly
so useful as ours made of iron.
[Illustration: XI.
_Picture of Mammoth Scratched on Ivory._
_Fight between Reindeer Scratched on Slate._]
It is difficult to be certain how these stone-age people cooked their
food. Of course they could have roasted it, and the half-burnt bones in
some caves show that they did so; but in some caves in France there is
not a single burnt bone to be found. In these French cave dwellings,
too, there are no pieces of earthenware, as there are in some
others; so that the people could not have boiled it, unless they had
wooden pots and dropped red-hot stones into the water in them until the
meat got boiled, as some savages do now. Or they might have cooked it
under the hot ashes.
The people who used earthenware must have made more progress. It is
easy to understand how they made this useful discovery. Suppose they
had lighted a fire upon a damp clay soil, the earth would get baked
hard and crack off in pieces, and they would see that this soil could
be worked in the hands while soft into the shape of pans and dishes,
which could be dried quite hard in the sun or baked in hot ashes, just
as boys make clay marbles now. They could live much more comfortably
even with these rough earthenware things, and cook their food more
conveniently; but they still used the stone and flint tools and
weapons, and iron was still unknown to them.
The people of whom I have been speaking are principally the men of the
First Stone Age, when the art of polishing tools and weapons had not
been found out. They simply chipped these things out of the flints and
left them very rough; but the men of the next, or Second Stone Age,
made great improvements. They ground their flint knives and axes with
other stones, and rubbed them down to sharp edges and points, so that
they must have been much more useful for killing and cutting up the
animals they hunted. All their bone and horn tools are much better
made, and sometimes ornamented prettily with marks cut upon them. The
Second Stone Age men evidently wore clothing, most probably made of the
skins of animals—for the long strips of bone with a hole at one end
which you see in the picture could not have been used for any other
purpose, except to draw threads through something. The threads were
very likely either the sinews of animals pulled out of the flesh, or
thin strips of their skins, or perhaps the inner bark of a tree twisted
into a kind of string. In the colder parts of Europe and America these
ancient people would need some protection from the weather. How then
did the people of the First Stone Age manage, if they had no bone
needles, as I think they had not, with which to make clothing? They
must have wrapped themselves in the skins just as they came from the
backs of the animals.
It is not easy to be always sure, when we find a cave and all these
relics of pre-historic man, whether the inhabitants belonged to the
First or the Second Stone Age. Sometimes there are signs of polishing
and grinding on the tools, and then we may suppose that men were
gradually getting more skilful, until they finished off all their
weapons beautifully. But there is such a very great difference in the
perfection of these useful articles found in some places and those
found in others that we have no doubt men made slow progress, from the
rough or First Stone Age, to the polished or Second Stone Age.
In neither the first nor second stone period had men yet learned to
build any kind of habitations. They lived in caves simply, like wild
animals. On the banks of the river Vezère in France, which has cut
its way deeply through the rock, there are some celebrated caves once
inhabited by pre-historic men, and some of them are very large.
They were most likely hollowed out in the cliff by water, and many
generations of men lived here. In one of them four human skeletons were
found, with plenty of stone and flint tools, besides the bones of the
mammoth and lion, reindeer and other animals. The mammoth then as well
as the reindeer lived at that time in the valley of the Vezère. There
is no doubt that these caves were inhabited at separate times by people
who used only the roughest and simplest stone tools, and by others
who had made some progress and could polish their tools and make them
of bone and could scratch pictures of animals upon slips of bone and
slate. It is curious that all these drawings are side-view drawings,
and they are only outlines, just like the drawings of children now,
and the Esquimaux of the Arctic regions; because these people,
although they were grown up, had not discovered the art of drawing in
perspective and shading the figures. Still the pictures are wonderfully
true to nature, and must have been copied from living animals. There is
no earthenware in any of these caves, so that the useful art of making
pottery had not been discovered, neither is there any in the caves in
Switzerland, where the bones of the mammoth, lion, and rhinoceros are
also found, and the tools and weapons are much the same as those in the
French caverns. It is impossible to say whether the cave-dwellers of
France and Switzerland lived at the same time exactly, but they were in
about the same condition of civilization, and they must both have been
quite familiar with the appearance of the mammoth and lion, and other
animals, which are not mentioned in any history, however old it may be,
as inhabitants of these countries.
A discovery has lately been made in France of a large cavern near
Belfort, in the limestone rock, which has been covered up for ages. The
quarrymen while cutting out the stone came upon a small opening leading
into a very large cave, in which there was a great quantity of human
skeletons and bones and some beautifully ornamented vases, polished
stone bracelets, and a mat of plaited rushes. To these people, then,
the arts of pottery and weaving were known, and this was probably one
of their burying-places. They were evidently much more civilized than
the ancient people of the valley of the Vezère; but this cave must also
be of a great age, and its inhabitants have left no record of their
history in any kind of writing.
Quite lately, too, we have learned something of the early races of man
in Colorado. Many of the caves in that country have been altered and
made more like regular houses, and some appear even to have been cut
out of the rock entirely by human hands; and in the plains there are
ruins of large cities.
Though still in the stone age, for all the weapons yet found among
these ruins are of stone, the Colorado people were more civilized than
the stone-age people of the Vezère caverns, because they had begun
to build and knew how to make pottery. It is strange, too, that the
present natives of Colorado are not so civilized as the early people,
and if they have descended from them they have not improved, but rather
the contrary. There are other caverns in various parts of the world
containing these curious relics of races long since passed away, but
some of the principal have been mentioned, enough perhaps to interest
you and show you that men were living in Europe together with the large
animals of the Tertiary period, and that they had made very little
progress in the arts and manufactures, and had not even begun to build
the roughest houses.
In many parts of the world even now there are savages nearly as
uncivilized as the cave-dwellers of Europe were then. When Captain
Cook visited New Zealand, more than a hundred years ago, the natives
there had nothing but stone and bone tools, very like those found in
the European caverns, and the inhabitants of some of the islands in the
Pacific Ocean still use stone axes and hammers and bone needles.[25]
Captain Moresby, too, who made a voyage to the south-east coast of New
Guinea a few years ago, tells us that the natives have beautiful stone
axes, but they were so ignorant of the use of iron that they refused
to give him one of their stone axes for a new iron hatchet which he
offered them. No doubt the stone weapon cost a great deal of labour and
patience to make, and perhaps the iron one was made by machinery in a
few minutes, and was really more useful, but the native had proved his
own axe and knew nothing of the iron one, so that it is no wonder that
he refused it. But what a history these two axes tell—the stone and the
iron! The stone shows us man in his childhood, and the iron man in his
manhood, and what an immensely long time there is between the two. How
much thought, and trial and failure, and patience and industry, were
spent by mankind before the stone axe grew into the iron!
In Europe man has long since grown out of his childhood, but in many
parts of the world he is no more civilized than the men who saw the
mammoth crashing through the forests of England and France, and heard
the lion roar at night on the banks of the Thames, and watched the
hippopotamus swimming across the river at Westminster. It is most
likely, then, that Europe and parts of Asia and America were inhabited
long before those places where men are even now in the stone age—such
as the islands in the Pacific Ocean, New Guinea, Australia, &c.
What a life the pre-historic men of Europe must have lived! Here
they were surrounded by huge dangerous animals, and had no means of
protecting themselves against them but with these rough stone weapons.
Where London now stands with its miles of streets and busy life there
was a mighty forest, and the mammoth and rhinoceros tramped through
it by day, and the lion and hyena hunted the deer at night. When the
pre-historic men came down to the banks of the Thames in the day-time
to spear salmon, they saw the hippopotamus plunging about in the water
among the rushes, sweeping the long grass into their wide mouths, and
swimming from side to side with their young ones perched upon their
necks. It must have been a grand sight, but a fearful one too, and it
is no wonder that men thought the caves the only safe places to live in.
Sometimes in India the elephants come into the villages at night and
throw down wooden houses and kill people, and they are very much
feared, so that we can suppose how much more terrible the mammoth might
have been to the uncivilized cave-dwellers. If they shot at him with
the flint-pointed arrows they could scarcely hurt him, and it is more
likely that they got out of his way as quickly as possible whenever
they met him, and took good care never to interfere with the lion and
rhinoceros.
THE LAKE-DWELLERS.
Among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, there were some who did not
live in caves; but I think they must have lived a long time after the
cave-dwellers, when they built their houses out in the middle of the
lakes. These houses were built in a very curious way, and the remains
of them have been discovered in Ireland and Scotland, Switzerland and
other countries. The people carried quantities of stones, and earth,
and sticks out into the lake and let them sink to the bottom. Then
when they had piled up enough to make an island, they laid wood across
and set up their huts, and lived there surrounded by water. These were
very poor houses of course; but when men had begun to build for
themselves, they would find how much more comfortable they were than in
damp and dark caves. They must have had some kind of boats or canoes,
or they could not have passed between their lake-dwellings and the land
unless they swam to them; but I do not think that any of these boats
have been found. Perhaps they were made of the dried skins of animals
stretched over wooden frames, as I have seen savages make boats.
[Illustration: XII.
_Lake-Dwellings._]
There was another way of building these lake-dwellings, and a better
way too. Long poles were driven into the earth at the bottom of the
water, and when the builders had got enough of these together they
laid other poles across them, and built their huts on this floor above
the water. People are living now in much the same way near the Orinoco
river in South America, in New Guinea, and in Central Africa.[26]
The land all round is covered with water from the overflowing of the
rivers, which are very large, and the huts are built up on these poles
out of the way of it. The lake-dwellers of Europe would thus be safer
in their houses from dangerous animals than if they were on land. They
were more civilized than the cave-dwellers, but still a great many of
their tools and weapons were of stone and bone; yet we know that they
had made wonderful progress, because they had learned to make pottery,
and even to weave cloths out of hemp or flax. They had most likely
begun to plant and cultivate the land, too, for corn is found about
these dwellings, and the bones of domestic animals are very numerous.
They had left the cave-dwellers a long way behind in many things, in
wearing artificial clothing, in cultivating the land, and in keeping
domestic animals; but their implements—that is, their weapons and
tools—were not much improved, and were very much like those of the
cave-dwellers, though better finished and more polished than some of
theirs.
But not all the articles used by the lake people were of stone and
bone. Some of those who lived in the Swiss lakes had ornaments, such
as bracelets and hair-pins, made of the metal called bronze, and no
doubt they made spear-heads of the metal, because they would look to
usefulness before ornament.
Now you see how these people seem to have lived: first the old stone
age men, then those of the newer or polished stone age, and lastly
the lake-dwellers. The people of both the first and second stone ages
certainly saw the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, and reindeer
alive in France, Switzerland, and England; but when the lake-dwellings
were built, all these animals, except perhaps the reindeer, had died,
and most of the animals were the same as they are now. None of these
people have left us any kind of history whatever, except that which
their simple works tell us, their flint and bone weapons, and their
dwellings. They have set up no gigantic monuments like the Egyptians or
the Druids. They thought of no men to come after them who would take an
interest in their ways; but it is fortunate that what they did make was
of such lasting materials as stone and flint, or we should have known
next to nothing about their lives.
It is impossible to say how many thousands of years may have passed
before the rough stone weapons were replaced by the polished stone, or
the cave was exchanged for an artificial house in a lake; but you must
feel in your minds that the time was immense, and the more we study the
ways and works of pre-historic man, the more certain we become that it
is longer than the whole time that has passed since men first began to
use any kind of writing.
KITCHEN-MIDDENS.
I dare say you have seen untidy people in country places, and even in
towns, throw oyster-shells and broken dishes and dirt outside their
doors until quite a heap is formed. This is called a “midden,” and the
habit of doing this is a very old one. We learn just a little more of
the history of man from great middens made by ancient people in several
countries. They were first discovered in Denmark, and since then
they have been found in Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand. They are
sometimes very large, and must have been used by the whole village as
places to throw the refuse of their cookery in. When these heaps have
been dug into all sorts of things have been found in them—the shells
of oysters and mussels, bones of fishes, birds, and animals, pieces
of broken earthenware, little ornaments, stone axes, arrow-heads, wood
ashes, burnt bones, and other odds and ends. In Brazil many of these
kitchen-middens are on the sea shore, and it seems as if the people
who made them came there to live on the shell-fish, for the shells
are the same as those living in the sea close by now. In New Zealand
the middens contain many of the bones of the Moa, which was described
in “The Animal Part,” and has now perished, and these are cracked in
such a manner that the people evidently wanted to get at the marrow
in them, and it shows too that this gigantic bird was common in New
Zealand then. The midden makers seemed to have lived in the open air,
and wherever food was most plentiful. Perhaps they built huts of the
bark and small branches of trees like the Australian savages, but such
houses would not last. We only know of the life of the midden makers
from these heaps. Their weapons are of the same kind and pattern as
those of the Second Stone Age, but they had learned to make rough
earthenware dishes and basins, and some pieces of a woven material
have been found, and pieces of wood and bone worked with a little
skill. Whether they lived after or before the lake-dwellers I cannot
say, but I should think about the same time.
These pre-historic people, nevertheless, were not always thinking of
making things which were useful. They thought too of making ornaments,
many of which are found in their dwellings and graves. Like ourselves,
they had an idea that little trinkets improved their appearance. In
one grave a skeleton was found with a small pile of shells under its
neck, which no doubt had been strung together as a necklace, and when
the string rotted the shells parted and fell in a heap under the head,
to be a memorial of that ancient man or woman’s possession of the same
feelings as our own. Various little articles, too, found about the
lake-dwellings show that people liked to decorate themselves.
We shall never know what language they spoke, but they must have been
able to tell their thoughts to one another. It was most likely a simple
language with few words as names for things and a simple grammar, like
the language of savages, because they had not so many things to talk
about as we have. The names of animals would perhaps be imitated from
their cries and the noises they made. These cries would be among the
most familiar sounds to them, and when they wished to speak of some
animal the simplest way would be to imitate the noise it generally
makes. If we think of our own language, we shall see how very likely
this was. We have many such words. We teach our children the names of
animals by the sounds they make. The dog we call “bow-wow,” the cow
“moo-moo,” the duck “quack-quack,” and many other names of the same
kind which you will think of yourselves. At the present time even the
name by which the Egyptians call the donkey has almost exactly the
same sound as our “hee-haw.” This trick of doubling or repeating the
sound, too, is very common among savages, who are as far behind us as
the pre-historic men were. The natives of Australia give these double
names to a great many animals and things, and sometimes do the same
with English words. They call fish “ningy-ningy,” and a certain tree
the “bunya-bunya,” and their language is full of such words. But it is
not only the names of things which have been made in this way. Verbs as
well as nouns have grown up thus. When we whisper to one another, that
word imitates the low sound we make.
I shall leave you to trace the natural origin of the following words,
and think how much of man’s spoken language is taken from common
sounds. Thus we have roar, shriek, whistle, hiss, sigh, sing, ring,
thump, bump, clash, clang, bang, twang, clap, smack, slap, smash,
swish, swirl, gong, thong, boom, bellow, batter, chatter, clatter,
snap, snip, whip, gurgle, shiver, quiver, rumble, roll, rattle,
prattle, and a hundred more. Words thus derived from familiar sounds
abound in all languages, and they, no doubt, are the easy steps by
which men climbed to a more complicated speech. The earliest men must
have been obliged to pay great attention to animals and birds, which
have voices of their own; for to hunt and catch them was the principal
occupation of their lives; therefore, when speaking of them to one
another, they would naturally call them by names resembling the sounds
they made. Our verbs “to squeak” and “to squeal” are certainly taken
from the cries of animals when in pain; but I have said enough to show
you how language grew up among pre-historic people.
We do not know for certain that they had any musical instruments, but
they would hear the sighing of the wind among the trees, and it would
almost certainly be found out that blowing down a hollow stick or reed,
open at one end and closed at the other, would make a whistle; but if
they used any of these things they would not last like the stone tools,
and have decayed away; and we do know that they had begun to draw upon
such imperishable materials as bone and slate.
There is a very interesting specimen of a human fossil in the British
Museum, which you ought to go and see, if you can; but in case you are
not able there is a drawing of it on page 159.[27] This specimen was
brought to England about the year 1814. Others like it have since been
found imbedded in the hard breccia limestone rock at the same place on
the shore of the island of Guadaloupe. The skeleton most likely was
that of a woman, from the shape of some of the bones, and most probably
was of the race of Caribs, of whom there are none living now. Perhaps
this was originally a burying place of the ancient inhabitants of the
island, and when the sea washed the small broken pieces of shells and
corals over it (all of which contain lime) they hardened into breccia
rock, and the skeleton became completely imbedded in it. This must
have taken a very long time, at all events; but I do not think the
Guadaloupe fossils are as old as the people who lived in the caves in
France. Some little ornaments and articles of human workmanship are
found with these skeletons, which show that the people to whom they
belonged were still in the Stone Age. There is very little to judge
from when we wish to get some idea of the time these fossils have been
in this breccia: but at this particular place the rock is formed pretty
quickly, as we can see; and it is quite likely that these skeletons
were buried there long after the mammoth, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus
died out of Europe. However, they are the most complete specimens
we have of any fossil human beings. In looking at the drawing you will
see the leg bones and hips, part of the backbone, the ribs of one side,
and an arm bone; but you see no skull, because the bones of the skull
are very thin, and have become crushed down into the limestone. In one
of these fossils, which they have in Paris, taken from near the same
place, the bones are much more distinct, and part of the lower jaw with
some teeth in it can be seen. These fossil men no doubt lived before
the period of written human history began; but they are not considered
to be at all the oldest of pre-historic men.
[Illustration: XIII.
_The Guadaloupe Human Fossil._]
Two periods in the life of mankind followed all these long-lost and
forgotten people, and they are called the Bronze Age and the Iron
Age; but now _history_ comes in, and there are plenty of old records
and books to tell you about these. Bronze is a mixed metal of copper
and tin, and it was used by the oldest nations who have left any
histories—the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. It was better
than stone because it could be made sharper and would not chip, and
swords and armour, vases, axes, hammers, needles, &c., were made of
it.[28]
The Stone Age is beyond all history, the Bronze begins with it, and
the Iron Age began at some distant time before the dawn of authentic
history. Thus we are told, in Genesis iv. 22, that Tubal Cain taught
people to make it. It was used also by the Egyptians for perhaps 2,000
years before the Christian era; but the real Iron Age is that in which
we are living now. We can, indeed, make all metals much better than any
of the older nations.
But there is a wide gap between the time when people left off using
stone and discovered bronze and iron; and if one of the Druids could
come to life he might help us to fill it up, because those old
British priests had many secrets, which they told to one another from
generation to generation.
If the Spanish conquerors had not destroyed the civilization of Mexico
and Peru, we might know something of the discovery of the metals there,
and the people of India and China must have used them long ago; but
the first use of metal in any country where it was found out would
most likely be before the people had begun to put their language into
any kind of writing, so that the time would be forgotten among the
many scraps of lost knowledge which we have tried to collect from the
remains of the industry of pre-historic man.
We have seen how much these ancient people differed from us in their
civilization, and how far they were behind us in everything; but we
must not suppose that they were very different in bodily size and
shape. Some of their skulls might have belonged to a philosopher, or
they might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage. The
skulls from the Cromagnon and Engis caves are quite equal in size and
shape to those of several uncivilized, and even of some civilized
races of the present time, and there are people in all large cities
whose heads are not better formed. Though the outward signs of their
civilization then were so different from ours, it is not certain that
their mental capacity was much less.
A race possessing considerable civilization may, we know, pass away,
as the Assyrians and the Pyramid builders have. In one of the Pacific
islands—Easter Island—a thousand miles from the nearest land, there
are hundreds of carved images of stone, fifty or sixty feet high, and
weighing perhaps a hundred tons each. The people who made these must
have been very numerous and must have had considerable skill. Yet they
have passed away. The arts of Nineveh and Babylon have only lately
become known, so that, you see, the works of a race may easily become
hidden from us who follow. Quite lately, too, the works of a partly
civilized people have been discovered in Ohio in America. There are
there hundreds of mounds and earth embankments forming fortified camps.
Some of them are several miles round, and they could only have been
made by a very numerous and intelligent people who knew something about
geometry; for the circles, squares, and angles of these earthworks are
quite as correct as we could make them. Among the multitude of things
found here are copper tools made by hammering, ornamental pottery,
silver beads, plates of mica with scrolls and designs engraved on
them, and carefully carved pieces of stone. These carvings are most
curious and excellently finished. They represent human heads and
many animals, such as the bear, otter, wolf, beaver, raccoon, frog,
rattlesnake, heron, crow, &c. A people, then, who could do these things
and took pleasure in doing them must have possessed great intelligence
and a knowledge of things far beyond a simple state. They even had
religious ideas, such as they were, for they had places for sacrifice.
All their works are now overgrown by forests, but it is impossible to
mistake them; yet the native Indians of Ohio living now have no idea
that such a people lived in their country before them, and no tradition
at all about a people whose civilization was so far superior to their
own.
We may come nearer to our own times, and look at the Assyrians and
Egyptians. Until quite recently nothing was known about the Assyrians
except what could be learned from the few references made to them in
Scripture and some ancient writers; but Mr. Layard dug up their cities,
and found that they possessed the arts of building, sculpture, working
in metals, and a written language. All this was buried under the sand
of a desert! Then there is the great Pyramid of Egypt, built in a way
that we could not surpass, and with much knowledge of geometry and
other sciences.[29] The men who designed and constructed these works
could not have lived among a half-barbarous people; and as these are
the highest works of the people, how much there must have been that
went before, of which there is no trace now, when Assyria and Egypt
were in _their_ age of stone axes and flint arrow-heads.
I do not think that the Stone-Age men of Europe were nearly so
civilized. At all events, they have not left any such imperishable
monuments as the gigantic images of Easter Island, the earthworks of
the Ohio people, or the sculptures, writings, and buildings of the
Assyrians and Egyptians; but they might have been more civilized than
they seem to have been from their simple weapons and tools. They might
have made many things which were perishable, and have been destroyed
by time—things which would have given us a higher belief in their
intelligence and civilization.
The past history of the human race may be compared to the rise and
fall of the tide. Wave after wave has risen higher and higher on the
everlasting shore of Time, and when the tide was at its highest it has
fallen again slowly, to rise again and again in the same way through
many ages. We know that man may rise slowly from a simple condition
to much civilization and power, and may again sink back almost to
barbarism, as has been the case with the people of whom we have been
speaking, and then again a new civilization may grow up. It is possible
that all now savage nations are the sinking descendants of some, in
comparison, once civilized people. Modern nations are taking up the
ground of savages all over the world, and soon there will be no trace
of these simple people. Thus it may have been with mankind throughout
all the time during which they have occupied the earth, and so it may
be perhaps again.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] A fine Mexican MS. on diapered cloth, with figures and mystical
signs, has lately been added to the MS. department of the British
Museum.
[23] Some fine examples of papyrus writings on the North-west
Staircase, Upper Floor.
[24] British Antiquities Room, upper floor, Middle and Upper
Shelf-cases, Nos. 1, 2, and 5-12, flint and stone implements.
Table-case B, horn implements from French caves and Swiss
lake-dwellings.
[25] Examples of stone implements of New Zealanders in Ethnographical
Room, Cases No. 45-48, upper floor.
[26] In Lake Mohrya. _Across Africa_, by V. L. Cameron.
[27] At the end of Room VI., opposite the door, North Gallery.
[28] See examples in the Bronze Room, upper floor, British Museum.
[29] Built of nummulitic limestone, composed of shells of foraminifera.
See Case 15, Room V., North Gallery.
_CONCLUSION._
I have now put “The Puzzle of Life” together as well as I can, and
there is not much more to say. You must do the rest for yourselves by
going to the Museums, where all the pieces are collected, and seeing
them with your own eyes. When you stand before these silent witnesses
to the great age of our Earth, and all that is on it, you will feel how
wonderful the story they tell is. They have no words to speak to you,
but there is a power in your own minds which interprets their history
through your own thoughts. They are only lumps of rock and lifeless
bones, but they seem to say to you, “We are living again now, because
we are teaching you a lesson which the great Builder of this Universe
wishes you to learn from us. There is not a stone or fossil among us
but it has its tale to tell—a tale of time and tide, and long past
ages, and innumerable changes, and a life that was, and progress from
a lower to a higher existence. We have obeyed the same eternal laws
of one Creator from the beginning, as all things will to the end of
time. We have opened the great Book of Nature from the first page of
the ‘life-dawn animal’ to the last, on which the hand of the Almighty
has written the name of Man—his most perfect work. We, you, and all
things which have lived and will live, have bodies made of particles
which will be returned to the Earth, no single atom of which has been
destroyed since the first, but has been fashioned over and over again
into innumerable forms of tree and flower, of gossamer-winged insect
and towering mammoth, throughout the long ages in which our Globe has
known day and night, cold and heat, summer and winter.”
There is nothing sad, if we look at it rightly, in this constant
succession of life and death. It is
A moulding
Of forms, and a wondrous birth,
And a growing and fair unfolding
Of life from life, and life from death.
For death, a mother benign,
Transformeth but destroyeth not,
And the new thing fair of the old is wrought.
G. F. ARMSTRONG.
Is it not worth while then to listen to these stories of the Earth—to
spell them out for ourselves? They are written everywhere,—in the
mountains and valleys, the rivers and seas, on the hard faces of
granite cliffs, on the rounded pebbles of the sea beach, and even in
the finest dust of the roads. We have not to go far to hear them:
every foot-step on the ground covers a chapter great or small in the
universal history, and the stone walls of our houses could speak with
ten thousand tongues of all they witnessed in their long life on the
floor of an ancient ocean.
We can scarcely have a more pleasant occupation and greater interest
than in searching for and putting together the pieces of this wonderful
and beautiful puzzle, and in doing our utmost to “Summon from the
shadowy Past the forms that once have been.”
INDEX.
Age of bronze, 161;
of iron, 161;
of reptiles, 81
Aleph, 125
Amber, 69
Ammonites, 90, 97
Animal Part, the, 77;
animals of coal period, 71
Ants, white, 61
Arctic climate, 67;
expedition, 67
Archæopteryx, 91, 93
Australian savages, 127
Babylon and Nineveh, 164, 165
Bear, grisly, 106
Beginning of life, 58
Bird forms, earliest, 89;
reptiles, 85
Blacklead, 58
Boulders carried by ice, 48
Bogwood, 70
Boiling springs, 54
Bronze, age of, 161, 162;
implements in British Museum, 162
Brighton Downs, 99
Burning mountains, 19
Calamites, 42, 68
Cañons of Colorado, 8
Caves of Engis and Cromagnon, 163;
near Belfort and of Switzerland, 141;
of the Vezère, 139
Cetiosaurus, 86
Chalk, nature of, 26;
pits, 20;
ammonites and foraminifera in, 27;
period, 95;
under the ocean, 29, 99
“Challenger” expedition, 27
Changes have been gradual, 43
Cissbury camp, 134
Clay, London, 21, 22;
and mud, 33
Climate, Arctic, and of coal formations, 67
Club-mosses, 61
Clothing, 138
Coal beds, 31;
in Arctic regions, 67;
plants of the, 63;
is fossil wood, 73;
is sunlight compressed, 30
Colorado, the people in, 142
Compressed plants, 15
Conclusion, 168
Cookery, 137
Corals, 78
Creation, the plan of, 117
Cretaceous period, 96
Cromagnon and Engis, caves of, 163
Dawn of life, 56;
plant, 59
Denudation, 49, 50
Dinornis, specimens of, in British Museum, 116
Dinosaurus, 89
Dinotherium, 114
Drawings, pre-historic, 135
Dwellings and food of men, 137
Early histories, 123;
plant life, 59
Earth, early history of, 1, 2, 3;
interior of, 18;
intense heat of, 24;
climate of, 48;
not yet fit for man, 75;
‘foraminifera earth’, 30
Earthquakes, 18, 19
Earthworks of Ohio, 165
Easter island monuments, 164
Egypt, monuments of, 166
Eodendron, 59
Eophyton, 59
Eozöon, 57, 77
First weapons, 121
Fish-lizards, 85
Fishes, fossil, 71
Flint, origin of, 14;
in chalk, 96;
weapons, where found, 131;
tool manufactory, 134
Foraminifera, 20;
‘foraminifera earth’, 30;
drawings of, 97;
specimens of, in British Museum, 99
Forests under the sea, 75, 76
Fossil, derivation of, 10;
plants, 61;
sunlight, 73;
footprints, 83;
human, 157, 159
Food and dwellings, 137
Footprints, fossil, 83
Flying reptiles, 89
Geological part, 17
Geology, derivation of, 19
Geysers, 54
Gigantic animals, 101;
birds, 115
Glaciers and icebergs, 47
Granite, raised, 23;
appearance of, 24
Gravel, &c., 35
Great Irish Stag, drawing, &c., of, 108
Guadaloupe human fossil, 157
Heat of the Earth, 3, 18
Hebrew letters, 125
Hesperornis, 92
Hippopotamus in England, 105
Histories, early, 123
Human part, the, 120;
fossils, 157
Ice age, 45;
more than one, 48
Icebergs and glaciers, 47
Ichthyornis, 92
Ichthyosaurus, 85
Implements, flint and stone, in British Museum, 131;
bronze, 162
India, elephants in, 145
Insects in coal forests, 64
Irish stag, 107
Islands appear and disappear, 39
Jet, 69
Jurassic age, 89
Kangaroo, fossil, 115
Kitchen-middens, 152
Labyrinthodon, 2
Lake-dwellers, 146;
dwellings in Europe, Africa, Asia, and New Guinea, 149
Language, origin of; and of pre-historic man, 155
Laurentian rocks, 57
Lena river, mammoth found, 102
Life, the dawn of, 56;
‘life-dawn animal’, 57
Lignite, 69
Lion, English sabre-toothed, 106
Mammalia, 102
Mammoth, 49, 102-3;
bones of, in Siberia, Asia, North America, &c.;
drawing of, on ivory, 135;
in Essex, 104;
skull of, in British Museum, 104
Man and his works, 121;
his earliest inventions, 122;
mammoth, mastodon, reindeer, &c., contemporary with, 116;
pre-historic, 127, 131;
dwellings and food of, 137
Marsupial animal, 95
Mastodon, 102;
in Europe, America, India, &c., 104;
in Missouri, 128;
skeleton of, in British Museum, 104
Megalosaurus, 89
Megatherium, in South America, 110;
drawing of, 112;
account of, 113;
skeleton of, in British Museum, 113
Mexican writings, 124
Middens, kitchen, 152-4;
makers, life of, 153
Moa, 115-16
Monkeys, fossil, 102;
at Gibraltar, 102
Monuments of Easter Island, 164;
of Egypt and Assyria, 166
Mountains, burning, and covered with snow, 19
Moresby, Captain, in New Guinea, 143
New Guinea, stone age of, 143
New Zealand dinornis, 115;
moa, 116;
stone age of, 143
Nineveh and Babylon, ruins, &c., of, 164, 165
Norway, raised terraces of, 38
Ohio, earthworks of, 165
Oolite, 41, 86
Origin of language, 155
Papyrus writings, 125
Paris, built of shells, 100
Parts, the, are called fossils, 11
Past life, the signs of, 13
Peat, 70
Plan of creation, 117
Plants of coal forests, 63
Plesiosaurus, 85
Pottery, 141, 142
Pre-historic art, 133;
drawings, 135;
man, 127, 131;
weapons and tools, 129
Pterodactyl, derivation of, 89;
description of, 90
Puzzle, the framework of, 1-16;
parts of, where found, 5
Pyrenees, when raised, 100
Rain-drops, marks of, 84
Reindeer, drawing of, on slate, 135
Reptiles, the age of, 81
Rhinoceros in England, 105
Rocks, raising of the;
how placed, 21, 25;
carried by ice, 48
Sandstone, formation of, 25, 26;
Old Red, 62, 81;
New Red, 77
Slate hardened mud, 15
Sponges, 15, 78
Star-fish, 78
Stone age, 128;
first stone age, 137;
second, 138;
of New Guinea and New Zealand, 143, 145
Subsidence, 37
Succession of formations, 41, 42
Sucklers, 102
Sunlight, fossil, 73
Tertiary period, 34, 100
Time, the work of, 167
Tools, polished and rough, 139
Trilobite, 78
Upheaval and depression, 36, 38
Vegetable part, the, 56
Vertebrata, 101
Volcanoes and earthquakes, 19
Water, a powerful tool of Nature, 34, 45;
thrown out of the earth, 54
Weapons, early, 121;
and tools, where found, 131
Whales, 101
World, early history of the, 3, 4;
size and shape, 17;
materials of, 17;
heat of, 18
Work, the, of time, 167
Writing, origin of, 123;
Mexican, Egyptian, and Assyrian, 124, 125;
on papyrus, 125;
by signs, 125
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
‘The present little work, which is specially addressed to children,
is written in so pleasant and easy a style, and its descriptions of
life on the earth are on the whole so simple and accurate, that we can
heartily recommend it to the attention of those who seek such a guide.
The illustrations are good, and the general appearance of the book such
that it may compare most favourably with other primers of geology.’
GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE.
‘Written in clear and simple style, especially attractive to children.
It includes an account of pre-historic man, and shows in many other
ways that the writer is familiar with some of the latest phases of
geological thought.’
ACADEMY.
‘The avowed object of this charming little book is to place the results
of these researches within the grasp of children, by presenting them
in language at once clear, simple, and winning.... In this hard
task Mr. NICOLS has succeeded admirably, without resorting to that
base subterfuge—the attempt to clothe instruction in the guise of
fiction.... This is true education, for it teaches children first to
observe and then to reason.... Though the style of this delightful book
is simple and childlike, it is as far as possible removed from being
childish.’
PALL MALL GAZETTE.
‘The language is plain, the descriptions are lucid, the illustrations
apt, and the broad facts of the science are very correctly stated. The
work, too, is free from all attempts at fine writing.... We wish the
book success as at any rate an attempt to lay before the young fact
instead of fiction.’
QUARTERLY JOURNAL of SCIENCE.
‘The book is a successful attempt to explain the simplest facts of
geology, and of the succession of life on the earth.’
WESTMINSTER REVIEW.
‘The idea is a happy one, and will recommend itself to children; and we
are bound to say that Mr. NICOLS has carried out his idea remarkably
well, and produced a work which will do much to spread sound notions
upon the gradual development of our earth and its inhabitants to the
condition in which we now see them.... We can safely recommend Mr.
NICOLS’ little book as one that will have a most beneficial effect in
opening the minds of its young readers.’
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW.
‘This is a good little book, cleverly written by an able geologist, and
well adapted for children. We can recommend the volume as a present to
any intelligent boy or girl.’
LANCET.
‘This book appears to be, in style, language, and scope, eminently
adapted for its purpose, which is to awaken among the little folks an
interest “in the history of life upon the earth,” and “give them the
taste for more extended study in after years.”’
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS.
‘“Though these pages are designed for young persons,” says the Author,
“other readers, perhaps, who are not familiar with the subject, may
find some interest in them, if they are not deterred by the necessarily
simple style,”—which, we venture to say, they most assuredly will
not be.... To many grown persons, therefore, as well as their
descendants, will this book be a great boon, which, if they are at all
liberal-minded, they will advocate as well as appreciate.... Like the
Science Primers of Professors Huxley, Roscoe, Balfour Stewart, &c., if
duly read and weighed, it will tend to unravel and sweep away a deal of
baneful superstition.’
LAND and WATER.
‘That Mr. NICOLS has succeeded in the object he proposed to himself
may be safely affirmed. He has done his work briefly and lucidly, and
has produced a book capable of arresting the attention, not only of
children, but of those from whom they receive their earlier lessons.’
The COUNTRY.
‘A perfect “Open Sesame” for young scientific students, and so
cleverly composed as to make students of those who are not scientific:
not merely the young, but older people too. Mr. NICOLS thoroughly
understands his work.’
NOTES and QUERIES.
‘Easily and attractively written for young people.... The treatment of
so wide a subject, and the condensing it into a volume of 150 pages is
no light task. We can, however, congratulate Mr. NICOLS upon having
accomplished it in so judicious, perhaps, better still, so suggestive
a manner; and we have no doubt that his little book will become a
well-worn favourite in the hands of all thoughtful and intelligent
children who may be so fortunate as to possess it.’
ENGINEER.
‘The manner in which the pieces of the puzzle—fossils—are found, put
together, and interpreted, is related in language readily understood
by children; the description of the vegetable, animal, and human parts
being peculiarly interesting. The illustrations are the best of the
kind with which we are acquainted.... We strongly recommend it.’
SCHOOLMASTER.
‘It is the puzzle as to the history of life on the earth unravelled
in a manner to interest and enlighten the minds, and to develop the
observing and reflecting faculties of children.... The results of
costly and laborious investigations in many different branches of
science are concentrated in these free and easy lessons or colloquial
lectures to young children.... Calculated to arouse an interest in all
but the dullest and most indifferent juvenile minds.... Will be found
invaluable to teachers and a great help in the rational cultivation of
the intelligence of the rising generation.’
SCHOOL BOARD CHRONICLE.
‘The statement of these facts, though made with all the sobriety due to
a scientific discourse, has all the interest of a story for the young;
and the narrative, if we mistake not, will interest other readers than
those for whom it is primarily written. A word of commendation must be
given to the illustrations, which are exceedingly well drawn.’
EDUCATIONAL TIMES.
‘To place the “simple truths of science” in rivalry with fairy tales
and merry picture-books is not so hopeless as at first sight may seem;
and certainly the simple, attractive style in which the marvels of the
physical world are here set out must not only interest, but charm every
bright child of eager intellect. Simplicity is observed to the utmost,
but it is the simplicity of truth, so that the child is not interested
at the expense of having afterwards to unlearn what he has read or
listened to.’
LIVERPOOL WEEKLY ALBION.
‘Mr. ARTHUR NICOLS has attempted a task which at first sight seems
extremely difficult, but which he has successfully achieved....
Children can scarcely help understanding and being interested in the
wonderful story of the earth’s crust, and of past organic life upon it,
which he unfolds. There is nothing childish about his style, yet he
writes with perfect simplicity.... A better book to put into the hands
of thoughtful children, or for use as a text-book by persons engaged in
the private tuition of the young, it would be difficult to find.’
The SCOTSMAN.
‘Facts are stranger than any fancies which emanate from the writers
of even fairy tales, and when they can be brought home to youthful
students by ocular demonstrations the facts are invariably preferred to
the fancies.... The illustrations which adorn the book are well drawn,
and sufficiently numerous for the purpose.... The Author is a genial
and reliable guide to a solution of the puzzle of life.’
ENGLISH MECHANIC.
London, LONGMANS & CO.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 29 Changed: For innumerable agest hese little creatures
to: For innumerable ages these little creatures
pg 91 Changed: Footnote 1: Wall-case No. 11 in Room III., several
specimens, mperfect
to: Footnote 1: Wall-case No. 11 in Room III., several
specimens, imperfect
pg 131 Changed: lived as that these flin weapons and tools
to: lived as that these flint weapons and tools
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