The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences

by Edward Hitchcock

In the fact, also, that we find in fossil specimens organs of respiration, such as lungs, gills, and trachea, we learn that the process of a circulation of blood, and its purification by means of the oxygen of the atmosphere, have never varied. Animal heat, too, dependent as it is essentially upon this oxygenating process, was always derived from the same source as at present.

The perfectly preserved minute vessels of vegetables enable us, by means of the microscope, to identify them with the plants now alive; and they prove, too, incontestably, that the nourishment of vegetables has always been of the same kind, and has been converted into the various proximate principles of plants by the same processes.

Again. We have evidence that these ancient animals possessed the same senses as their congeneric races now on the globe. We have one good example in which that most delicate organ, the eye, is most perfectly preserved. It is well known that the visual organ of insects and of crustaceans is composed of a multitude—often several hundreds or thousands—of eyes, united into one, so as to serve the purpose of a multiplying glass; each eye producing a separate image of the object observed. Such an eye had the trilobite. Each contained at least four hundred nearly spherical lenses on the surface of the cornea, united into one organ; revealing to us the interesting fact, that the relations of light to animal organization were the same in that remote era as they now are.

But I need not multiply proof of the functional identity of organic nature in all ages. It may, however, be inquired, how this identity, as well as that of anatomical structure, is reconciled with the great anomalies, both in size and form, which have confessedly prevailed among ancient animals. Compare the plants and animals which now occupy the northern parts of the globe with those which flourished there in the remote periods of geological history, and can we believe them to be portions of one great system of organic nature?

Compare, for instance, the thirty or forty species of ferns now growing to the height of a few inches, or one or two feet, in Europe and this country, with the more than two hundred species already dug out of the coal mines, many of which were forty to forty-five feet in height; or the diminutive ground pines, and equiseta, now scarcely noticed in our forests, with the gigantic lepidodendron, sigillaria, calamites, and equiseta, of the carboniferous period; and who will not be struck with the great difference between them?

Or go to Germany, and imagine the bones of the dinotherium to start out of the soil, and become clothed with flesh and instinct with life. You have before you a quadruped eighteen feet in length, and of proportional height, much larger than the elephant, and with curved tusks reaching two or three feet below its lower jaw, while no other living animal would be found there larger than the ox, or the horse—mere pygmies by the side of such a monster, and evidently unfit to be his contemporaries.

Again. Let the megatherium be brought back to life on the pampas of South America, and you have an animal twelve feet long and eight feet high, with proportions perfectly colossal. Its fore feet were a yard long, its thigh bone three times thicker than that of the elephant, its width across the haunches five feet, its spinal marrow a foot in diameter, and its tail, where it was inserted into the body, two feet in diameter. What a giant in comparison with the sloth, the anteater, and the armadillo, to which it was allied by anatomical structure!

Still more unequal in size, as compared with living batrachians, was the labyrinthidon, once common in England and Germany, if, indeed, the tracks on sandstone were made by that animal. It was, in fact, a frog as large as an ox, and perhaps as large as an elephant. Think of such animals swarming in our morasses at the present day!

But coming back from Europe, and turning our thoughts to the animals that trod along the shores of the estuary that once washed the base of Mount Holyoke, in New England, we shall encounter an animal, probably of the batrachian family, of more gigantic proportions. It was the Otozoum Moodii, a biped, with feet twenty inches long, more than twice the size of those of the labyrinthidon; yet its tracks on the imperishable sandstone show that such a giant once trod upon the muddy shore of that ancient estuary.

Along that same shore, also, enormous struthious birds moved in flocks, making strides from three to five feet long, with feet eighteen inches long, lifting their heads, it may be, from twelve to eighteen feet above the ground, surpassing, as it appears, even the gigantic dinornis of New Zealand, now that the feet of the latter have been discovered. I refer to the Brontozoum giganteum, whose tracks are so common on the new red sandstone of the Connecticut valley. What dwarfs are we in comparison, who now consider ourselves lords of that valley!