The plants of this era are few and unobtrusive. Equiseta, calamites, ferns, Voltzia, and a few of the other families found so abundantly in the preceding formation, here present themselves, but in diminished size and quantity.
This seems to be the proper place to advert to certain memorials of a peculiar and unexpected character respecting these early ages in the sandstones. So low as the bottom of the carboniferous system, slabs are found marked over a great extent of surface with that peculiar corrugation or wrinkling which the receding tide leaves upon a sandy beach when the sea is but slightly agitated; and not only are these ripple-marks, as they are called, found on the surfaces, but casts of them are found on the under sides of slabs lying above. The phenomena suggests the time when the sand ultimately formed into these stone slabs, was part of the beach of a sea of the carbonigenous era; when, left wavy by one tide, it was covered over with a thin layer of fresh sand by the next, and so on, precisely as such circumstances might be expected to take place at the present day. Sandstone surfaces, ripple-marked, are found throughout the subsequent formations: in those of the new red, at more than one place in England, they further bear impressions of rain-drops which have fallen upon them—the rain, of course, of the inconceivably remote age in which the sandstones were formed. In the Greensill sandstone, near Shrewsbury, it has even been possible to tell from what direction the shower came which impressed the sandy surface, the rims of the marks being somewhat raised on one side, exactly as might be expected from a slanting shower falling at this day upon one of our beaches. These facts have the same sort of interest as the season rings of the Craigleith conifers, as speaking of a parity between some of the familiar processes of nature in those early ages and our own.
In the new red sandstone, impressions still more important in the inferences to which they tend, have been observed,—namely, the footmarks of various animals. In a quarry of this formation, at Corncockle Muir, in Dumfriesshire, where the slabs incline at an angle of thirty-eight degrees, the vestiges of an animal supposed to have been a tortoise are distinctly traced up and down the slope, as if the creature had had occasion to pass backwards and forwards in that direction only, possibly in its daily visits to the sea. Some slabs similarly impressed, in the Stourton quarries in Cheshire, are further marked with a shower of rain which we know must have fallen afterwards, for its little hollows are impressed in the footmarks also, though more slightly than on the rest of the surface, the comparative hardness of a trodden place having apparently prevented so deep an impression being made. At Hessberg, in Saxony, the vestiges of four distinct animals have been traced, one of them a web-footed animal of small size, considered as a congener of the crocodile; another, whose footsteps having a resemblance to an impression of a swelled human hand, has caused it to be named the cheirotherium. The footsteps of the cheirotherium have been found also in the Stourton quarries above mentioned. Professor Owen, who stands at the head of comparative anatomy in the present day, has expressed his belief that this last animal was the same batrachian of which he has found fragments in the new red sandstone of Warwickshire. At Runcorn, near Manchester, and elsewhere, have been discovered the tracks of an animal which Mr. Owen calls the rynchosaurus, uniting with the body of a reptile the beak and feet of a bird, and which clearly had been a link between these two classes.
If geologists shall ultimately give their approbation to the inferences made from a recent discovery in America, we shall have the addition of perfect birds, though probably of a low type, to the animal forms of this era. It is stated to be in quarries of this rock, in the valley of Connecticut, that footprints have been found, apparently produced by birds of the order grallæ, or waders. “The footsteps appear in regular succession on the continuous track of an animal, in the act of walking or running, with the right and left foot always in their relative places. The distance of the intervals between each footstep on the same track is occasionally varied, but to no greater amount than may be explained by the bird having altered its pace. Many tracks of different individuals and different species are often found crossing each other, and crowded, like impressions of feet upon the shores of a muddy stream, where ducks and geese resort.” [103] Some of these prints indicate small animals, but others denote birds of what would now be an unusually large size. One animal, having a foot fifteen inches in length, (one-half more than that of the ostrich,) and a stride of from four to six feet, has been appropriately entitled, ornithichnites giganteus.
ERA OF THE OOLITE.
COMMENCEMENT OF MAMMALIA.
The chronicles of this period consist of a series of beds, mostly calcareous, taking their general name (Oolite System) from a conspicuous member of them—the oolite—a limestone composed of an aggregation of small round grains or spherules, and so called from its fancied resemblance to a cluster of eggs, or the roe of a fish. This texture of stone is novel and striking. It is supposed to be of chemical origin, each spherule being an aggregation of particles round a central nucleus. The oolite system is largely developed in England, France, Westphalia, and Northern Italy; it appears in Northern India and Africa, and patches of it exist in Scotland, and in the vale of the Mississippi. It may of course be yet discovered in many other parts of the world.
The series, as shewn in the neighbourhood of Bath, is (beginning with the lowest) as follows:—1. Lias, a set of strata variously composed of limestone, clay, marl, and shale, clay being predominant; 2. Lower oolitic formation, including, besides the great oolite bed of central England, fullers’ earth beds, forest marble, and cornbrash; 3. Middle oolitic formation, composed of two sub-groups, the Oxford clay and coral rag, the latter being a mere layer of the works of the coral polype; 4. Upper oolitic formation, including what are called Kimmeridge clay and Portland oolite. In Yorkshire there is an additional group above the lias, and in Sutherlandshire there is another group above that again. In the wealds (moorlands) of Kent and Sussex, there is, in like manner, above the fourth of the Bath series, another additional group, to which the name of the Wealden has been given, from its situation, and which, composed of sandstones and clays, is subdivided into Purbeck beds, Hastings sand, and Weald clay.
There are no particular appearances of disturbance between the close of the new red sandstone and the beginning of the oolite system, as far as has been observed in England. Yet there is a great change in the materials of the rocks of the two formations, shewing that while the bottoms of the seas of the one period had been chiefly arenaceous, those of the other were chiefly clayey and limy. And there is an equal difference between the two periods in respect of both botany and zoology. While the new red sandstone shews comparatively scanty traces of organic creation, those in the oolite are extremely abundant, particularly in the department of animals, and more particularly still of sea mollusca, which, it has been observed, are always the more conspicuous in proportion to the predominance of calcareous rocks. It is also remarkable that the animals of the oolitic system are entirely different in species from those of the preceding age, and that these species cease before the next. In this system we likewise find that uniformity over great space which has been remarked of the Faunas of earlier formations. “In the equivalent deposits in the Himalaya Mountains, at Fernando Po, in the region north of the Cape of Good Hope, and in the Run of Cutch, and other parts of Hindostan, fossils have been discovered, which, as far as English naturalists who have seen them can determine, are undistinguishable from certain oolite and lias fossils of Europe.” [108a]
The dry land of this age presented cycadeæ, “a beautiful class of plants between the palms and conifers, having a tall, straight trunk, terminating in a magnificent crown of foliage.” [108b] There were tree ferns, but in smaller proportion than in former ages; also equisetaceæ, lilia, and conifers. The vegetation was generally analogous to that of the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, which seems to argue a climate (we must remember, a universal climate) between the tropical and temperate. It was, however, sufficiently luxuriant in some instances to produce thin seams of coal, for such are found in the oolite formation of both Yorkshire and Sutherland. The sea, as for ages before, contained algæ, of which, however, only a few species have been preserved to our day. The lower classes of the inhabitants of the ocean were unprecedentedly abundant. The polypiaria were in such abundance as to form whole strata of themselves. The crinoidea and echinites were also extremely numerous. Shell mollusks, in hundreds of new species, occupied the bottoms of the seas of those ages, while of the swimming shell-fish, ammonites and belemnites, there were also many scores of varieties. The belemnite here calls for some particular notice. It commences in the oolite, and terminates in the next formation. It is an elongated, conical shell, terminating in a point, and having, at the larger end, a cavity for the residence of the animal, with a series of air-chambers below. The animal, placed in the upper cavity, could raise or depress itself in the water at pleasure by a pneumatic operation upon the entral air tube pervading its shell. Its tentacula, sent abroad over the summit of the shell, searched the sea for prey. The creature had an ink-bag, with which it could muddle the water around it, to protect itself from more powerful animals, and, strange to say, this has been found so well preserved that an artist has used it in one instance as a paint, wherewith to delineate the belemnite itself.
The crustacea discovered in this formation are less numerous. There are many fishes, some of which (acrodus, psammodus, &c.,) are presumed from remains of their palatal bones, to have been of the gigantic cartilaginous class, now represented by such as the cestraceon. It has been considered by Professor Owen as worthy of notice, that, the cestraceon being an inhabitant of the Australian seas, we have, in both the botany and ichthyology of this period, an analogy to that continent. The pycnodontes, (thick-toothed,) and lepidoides, (having thick scales,) are other families described by M. Agassiz as extensively prevalent. In the shallow waters of the oolitic formation, the ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and other huge saurian carnivora of the preceding age, plied, in increased numbers, their destructive vocation. [110] To them were added new genera, the cetiosaurus, mososaurus, and some others, all of similar character and habits.