"These fishes seem to have thronged the waters of the period, and their remains are often found in masses, as if they had been suddenly entombed in living shoals by the sediment which now contains them."
I beg leave to quote somewhat at length the picturesque language of Hugh Miller[60] regarding these rocks as found in Scotland.
"The river bull-head, when attacked by an enemy, or immediately as it feels the hook in its jaws, erects its two spines at nearly right angles with the plates of the head, as if to render itself as difficult of being swallowed as possible. The attitude is one of danger and alarm; and it is a curious fact, to which I shall afterward have occasion to advert, that in this attitude nine-tenths of the Pterichthes of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are to be found.... It presents us, too, with a wonderful record of violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but on whole tribes."
"At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved, the tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions.... The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended.... By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations?
"Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death."
I shall not taunt the uniformitarians by asking them to direct us to some modern analogies. But I would have the reader remember that these Devonian and other rocks are absolutely world-wide in extent.
Surely Howorth is talking good science when he says that his masters Sedgwick and Murchison taught him "that no plainer witness is to be found of any physical fact than that Nature has at times worked with enormous energy and rapidity," and "that the rocky strata teem with evidence of violent and sudden dislocations on a great scale."
I have spoken only of the class Fishes. But what other class of the animal kingdom will not point us a similar lesson? The Reptiles and Amphibians, to say nothing of the larger Mammals, are also found in countless myriads, packed together as if in natural graveyards. Everybody knows of the enormous numbers and splendid preservation of the great reptiles of the Western and Southern States, untombed by Leidy, Cope and Marsh. One patch of Cretaceous strata in England, the Wealden, has afforded over thirty different species of dinosaurs, crocodiles, and pleisosaurs. Mr. Chas. H. Sternberg, one of Zittel's assistants, recently reported great quantities of Amphibians from the Permian of Texas. They are of all sizes, some frogs being six feet long, others ten. Besides these he found three "bone-beds" full of minute forms an inch or less in length. Of the small ones, which I judge must represent whole millions of young ones suddenly entombed, he says:
"I got over twenty perfect skulls, many with vertebrae attached, and thousands of small bones from all parts of the skeleton. In one case, a complete skull, one-fourth of an inch in length, had connected with it nearly the entire vertebral column, with ribs in position, coiled upon itself, bedded with many bones of other species in a red silicious matrix. So perfectly were they weathered out that they lay in bas-relief as white and perfect as if they had died a month ago; a single row of teeth, like the points of cambric needles, occupied both sets of jaws."[61]
How many more such cases there may have been in these "three bone-beds full" of similar remains, it would be interesting to know. But though somewhat aside from the present subject, I cannot refrain in passing from referring to the wonderful preservation of these remains. It is preposterous to say that these bones have lain thus exposed to the weather for the millions of years postulated by the popular theory. There is not a particle of scientific evidence to prove that they are not just as recent as any specimen from the Tertiaries or the Pleistocene. Buffon and Cuvier proved the mammals to be of "recent" age, because they occurred in the superficial deposits. They never heard of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous of Colorado and Wyoming, nor these Permian of Texas. Think of this frog's teeth "like the points of cambric needles," and he and his fellows "as perfect as if they had died a month ago." Of one of the big six-foot specimens this author says: "Its head was so beautifully preserved, and cleaned under long erosion, it was difficult to believe it was not a recent specimen." While of the little six-inch fellow referred to above he says: "The bones of the skull are perfectly preserved, quite smooth, and show the sutures distinctly; there is no distortion, some red matrix attached below seems absolutely necessary to convince the mind that it is not a thing of yesterday." James Geikie[62] mentions the case of the Elgin sandstones "formerly classed as 'Old Red,'" but which are now called Triassic, "from the fact that they have yielded reptilian remains of a higher grade than one would expect to meet with in old Red Sandstone." Since these strata slide up and down so easily, we have here far more urgent scientific reasons for calling these amphibian remains of Texas among the most "recent" geological deposits on the globe.