No. 3. (Portion magnified two natural sizes.)
No. 4. Coralline. (Natural size.)
Here is one more form of life of this ancient period; it is evidently a coralline, which we also procured at Polperro.
Let us suppose our readers to have made themselves familiar with these organic remains, simply as characteristic and illustrative of this formation; they will easily find their way into other traces and remnants of ancient life in the Silurian epoch. How absurd must seem the development hypothesis to those who rightly ponder these old, old vestiges! It seems to us a very idle idea to suppose that a trilobite could develop itself into a bird, or a monkey, or by any series of happy accidents, could become a man;[[33]] yet such has been the theory of those who overlook what some writer on geology, whose name we forget, has expressed strongly in these words: “There is no fact which has been demonstrated more completely to the satisfaction of every man of real science, than that there is no known power in nature capable of creating a new species of animal, or of transmuting one species into another.”
We close this chapter on the Silurian system in the eloquent words of Professor Sedgwick: “The elevation of the faunas of successive periods was not made by transmutation, but by creative additions, and it is by watching these additions that we get some insight into nature’s true historical progress. Judging by our evidence—and what else have we to judge by?—there was a time when Cephalopods were the highest type of animal life. They were then the Primates of this world, and, corresponding to their office and position, some of them were of noble structure and gigantic size. But these creatures were degraded from their rank at the head of Nature, and Fishes next took the lead; and they did not rise up in nature in some degenerate form, as if they were only the transmuted progeny of the Cephalopods, but they started into life in the very highest ichthyic type ever reached.
“Following our history chronologically, Reptiles next took the lead, and, with some evanescent exceptions, they flourished during the countless ages of the secondary period as the lords and despots of the world: and they had an organic perfection corresponding to their exalted rank in Nature’s kingdom; for their highest orders were not merely great in strength and stature, but were anatomically raised far above any forms of the Reptile class now living in the earth. This class, however, was in its turn to lose its rank. Mammals were added next (near the commencement of the tertiary period), and seem to have been added suddenly. Some of the early extinct forms of this class, which we now know only by ransacking the ancient catacombs of Nature, were powerful and gigantic, and we believe well fitted for the place they filled. But they in turn were to be degraded from their place in Nature, and she became what she now is by the addition of man. By this last addition she became more exalted than before. Man stands by himself, the despotic lord of the living world; not so great in organic strength as many of the despots that went before him in Nature’s chronicle, but raised far above them all by a higher development of brain, by a framework that fits him for the operations of mechanical skill, by superadded reason, by a social instinct of combinations, by a prescience that leads him to act prospectively, by a conscience that makes him amenable to law, by conceptions that transcend the narrow limits of his vision, by hopes that have no full fruition here, by an inborn capacity of rising from individual facts to the apprehension of general laws, by a conception of a cause for all the phenomena of sense, and lastly, by a consequent belief in the God of nature:—such is the history of nature.”[[34]]
LANDS END, CORNWALL.