Fig. 131.—Abdominal part of a Carboniferous Scorpion.[54]
We know too little of the spiders and scorpions of the Carboniferous to say more than that they closely resemble modern forms. Two of the scorpions are represented in [Figs. 131 and 132]; and the only spider certainly known, which is from Silesia, is said to belong to the group of the hunting or trap-door spiders (Lycosa).[55]
The Batrachians of the Coal are its most characteristic and remarkable air-breathers,—especially so as the precursors of the reptiles of the Mesozoic age. Cope in a recent summary enumerates no less than thirty-nine genera and about one hundred species; and to these have to be added at least a dozen more recently discovered in Europe; though it was only in 1841 that the first indications of such creatures were found, and were then regarded by geologists with the same scepticism which some of them still apply to Eozoon. The first trace ever observed of batrachians in the Carboniferous consisted of a series of small but well-marked footprints found by the late Sir W. E. Logan in the Lower Carboniferous shales of Horton Bluff, in Nova Scotia. In that year this painstaking geologist had examined the coal-fields of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, with the view of following up his important discovery of the Stigmariæ, or roots of Sigillaria, as accompaniments of the coal-underclays. On his return he read a paper, detailing his observations, before the Geological Society of London. In this he mentioned the footprints in question; but the paper was published only in abstract, and the importance of the discovery was overlooked for a time, the anatomists evidently being shy to acknowledge the validity of the evidence for a fact so unexpected. [Fig. 133] is a representation of another slab subsequently found in beds of the same age in Nova Scotia, and which may serve to indicate the nature of Sir William’s discovery. In consequence of the neglect of this first hint by the London geologists, the discovery of bones of a batrachian by von Dechen at Saarbruck in 1844, and that of footprints by King in Pennsylvania in the same year, are usually represented as the first facts of this kind. My own earliest discovery of reptilian bones in Nova Scotia was made in 1844, though not published till some time afterward, and was followed up by further collections in company with Sir Charles Lyell in 1851, at which time also the earliest land-snail was found, and in the following year the first millepede. Since that time the progress of discovery has been astonishingly rapid, and has extended over most of the principal coal-areas on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fig. 132.—Carboniferous Scorpion (Eoscorpius carbonarius, Meek and Worthen). Illinois.
