The “holothurida,” or “sea-cucumber,” is found occasionally in the Isle of Wight, beautifully fossilized. A specimen was shown to me, from the beach near Chale; it was a variety, but unquestionably of this class of animals.
A fossil, figured in one of the “chromo-plates” to this volume, has obtained the name of a “troglodyte;” I do not know why. I suspect it was one of the “asteridæ” when alive, but that in the death-struggle, the long arms collapsed and twisted together.
I have frequently found what I believe to have been some such organ as the stomach of a star-fish in the centre of hard pebbles. The form was always pentagonal, like the corolla of certain flowers pressed flat.
The “myriapod,” depicted in Plate V., I should at once conclude to have been a marine insect, answering to some of our “scolopendridæ,” if the head were not lacking. But since the back or spine in this fossil is all in one piece, and there are no lateral plates or divisions for the several pairs of feelers, it may be, in accordance with such a frame, that the head fitted on without the apparent juncture of a neck; and if so, this may be an entire insect. It is right however to add, that I feel some doubts about this.
The Plate VI. contains a figure of a fossil to which I have attached the name of “Spindle-choanite.” In fact, the specimen, until cut in twain, was fusiform; and, I have no doubt, a complete animal.
The choanite from Eastbourne, uncut, Pl. IV., portrays a creature who, I think, expired in a vehement struggle. This would keep him on the surface of the siliceous flood; and it would harden, for the most part, beneath him, leaving his limbs sprawled out on the top of the pebble, as now seen. The beautiful “pyriform” specimen, Pl. VI., shows a similar struggle, amidst liquid agate and manganese. In the large Actinia, or “star-choanite,” portrayed in the frontispiece, the happy animal died quite quietly; and that is why his fossil mummy is of such a noble size and development.
The figure called “Nondescript,” Pl. IV., I do not think represents any complete animal, but a part of the organization of one. I have traced its likeness, in the “Animal Kingdom,” by T. Rymer Jones; and think it not improvable that a woodcut at p. 364 of that most interesting volume depicts, in the arms of one of the “Brachiopoda,” in that “calcareous loop” with its curved “crura,” the exact structure which, in the living animal, served to open or shut the bivalve shell, but in the fossil specimen looks like a miniature-painting on ivory, to perpetuate some curious organism in the liveliest colours of the pallet. “Terebratula Chilensis” is Mr. Rymer Jones’s animal; and in the very vicinity where I found my fossil in question, I have since obtained, in a flint pebble from the cliff, a beautifully petrified “Pecten” (same species of shell) in agate.
I might multiply remarks and instances such as these; but it is not needed. Every one will form their own opinion, in collecting fossil pebbles, as to what the originals were; but I think they will generally agree with me, that while our living individuals differ in many points, still we have mostly types of the same species actually existing in our present seas.
What all connoisseurs, and even amateurs, should do, is to preserve every remarkable specimen they may obtain, along with an accurate note of where they got it. It is a great pity that, among so many persons who have at once discernment and a liking for this branch of Mineralogy, there are so few who will be at the trouble of what lawyers call “taking minutes” of the evidence which comes before them in the course of the pursuit. I have looked over several fair enough collections made by amateurs; but, with one exception, I never knew an instance in which the collector could tell me, with any degree of certainty, from what particular beach he had gathered this or that specimen. Of course, when a scientific investigation is proposed, such omission renders the most valuable part of the collection comparatively useless. For the locality is all-important. A pebble may thus be always traced to its geological “home” or birthplace. It can only have had one of three sources: either it was first dropped here, where you find it; or, it is a “travelled” pebble, having come round from some distant beach; or, it is an offering from the deep sea. The latter case is of exceedingly rare occurrence, and need hardly be taken into account; nevertheless, for truth’s sake, and to include all possible varieties, I cite it here.
A genuine deep-sea pebble is a waif which I have only twice, as yet, met with in my sea-side experience. One of these was, I think, fished up in a dredging-net; the other was thrown on the beach during a storm. In both instances, the fossil was a “choanite,” and bore the marks of having been washed out of a limestone rock. The age of such fossil could not have been less than 4000 years, the date of Noah’s deluge, for obvious reasons; but it may have been considerably greater.