One of the most ancient groups of organic remains are the Brachiopoda, a group of Mollusca, particularly typified by the genus Lingula, a species of which still exist in the present seas; the Trilobites ([Fig. 17]), a family of Crustaceans, especially characteristic of this period; then come Productas, Terebratulæ, and Orthoceratites—other genera of Mollusca. The Corals, which appeared at an early period, seem to have lived in all ages, and survive to the present day.
Contemporaneously with these animals, plants of inferior organisation have left their impressions upon the schists; these are Algæ (aquatic plants, [Fig. 28]). As the continents enlarged, plants of a higher type made their appearance—the Equisetaceæ, herbaceous Ferns, and other plants. These we shall have occasion to specify when noticing the periods which constitute the Primary Epoch, and which consists of the following periods: the Carboniferous, the Old Red Sandstone, and Devonian, the Silurian, and the Cambrian.
Cambrian Period.
The researches of geologists have discovered but scanty traces of organic remains in the rocks which form the base of this system in England. Arenicolites, or worm-tracks and burrows, have been found in Shropshire, by Mr. Salter, to occur in countless numbers through a mile of thickness in the Longmynd rocks; and others were discovered by the late Dr. Kinahan in Wicklow. In Ireland, in the picturesque tract of Bray Head, on the south and east coasts of Dublin, we find, in slaty beds of the same age as the Longmynd rocks, a peculiar zoophyte, which has been named by Edward Forbes Oldhamia, after its discoverer, Dr. Oldham, Superintendent of the Geological Survey of India. This fossil represents one of the earliest inhabitants of the ocean, which then covered the greater part of the British Isles. “In the hard, purplish, and schistose rocks of Bray Head,” says Dr. Kinahan,[34] “as well as other parts of Ireland which are recognised as Cambrian rocks, markings of a very peculiar character are found. They occur in masses, and are recognised as hydrozoic animal assemblages. They have regularity of form, abundant, but not universal, occurrence in beds, and permanence of character even when the beds are at a distance from each other, and dissimilar in chemical and physical character.” In the course of his investigations, Dr. Kinahan discovered at least four species of Oldhamia, which he has described and figured.
The Cambrian rocks consist of the Llanberis slates of Llanberis and Penrhyn in North Wales, which, with their associated sandy strata, attain a thickness of about 3,000 feet, and the Barmouth and Harlech Sandstones. In the Longmynd hills of Shropshire these last beds attain a thickness of 6,000 feet; and in some parts of Merionethshire they are of still greater thickness.
Neither in North Wales, nor in the Longmynd, do the Cambrian rocks afford any indications of life, except annelide-tracks and burrows. From this circumstance, together with general absence of Mollusca in these strata, and the sudden appearance of numerous shells and trilobites in the succeeding Lingula Flags, a change of conditions seems to have ensued at the close of the Cambrian period.
Believing that the red colour of rocks is frequently connected with their deposition in inland waters, Professor Ramsay conceives it to be possible, that the absence of marine mollusca in the Cambrian rocks may be due to the same cause that produced their absence in the Old Red Sandstone, and that the presence of sun-cracks and rain-pittings in the Longmynd beds is a corroboration of this suggestion.[35]
The Silurian Period.
The next period of the Primary Epoch is the Silurian, a system of rocks universal in extent, overspreading the whole earth more or less completely, and covering up the rocks of older age. The term “Silurian” was given by the illustrious Murchison to the epoch which now occupies our attention, because the system of rocks formed by the marine sediments, during the period in question, form large tracts of country in Shropshire and Wales, a region formerly peopled by the Silures, a Celtic race who fought gloriously against the Romans, under Caractacus or Caradoc, the British king of those tracts. The reader may find the nomenclature strange, as applied to the vast range of rocks which it represents in all parts of the Old and New World, but it indicates, with sufficient exactness, the particular region in our own country in which the system typically prevails—reasons which led to the term being adopted, even at a time when its vast geographical extent was not suspected.