COR ANGUINUM. FAIRY HEART.
GALERITES ALBOGALERUS. A FAIRY LOAF.
AMMONITE.
A small open tray of twisted card contains several bits of carnelian, and a true bloodstone from the Yorkshire coast: while on a strip of canvas as a lit de repos, lie a cray-fish and some belemnites from the Gault formation of the Wight, hemmed round by lustrous sharks’ teeth: the latter now hardened into stone, and proclaiming by their isolated condition that the jaws in which they once grew were cartilaginous, and have therefore perished.
Thus the store of the lapidary comprises two main divisions, stones organic and inorganic, of the past history of the latter we know little; and can only judge by surmise, upon approved geological principles. In the former, there occur plain indications that we are not handling either an accidental “lusus” or an embryo; but that the structure here perpetuated was once endowed with life, and belonged to a creature having its assigned place in the scale of animated being.
Let any one fill a drawer with such specimens gathered by himself: and, omitting the question of mere marketable value, what jeweller’s counter can compare with it for real interest? The oriental gems, though they gleam as if “all air and fire,” are but dead crystals, and have never stood higher than they stand now: whereas these pretty fossils from our wave-beaten coast tell each a wondrous tale, and form a kind of tangible link between the zoophyte of to-day and his far-removed ancestry in the earliest seas which washed the surface of our globe.
A CRAY-FISH, FROM THE GAULT.
A SHARK’S TOOTH.