We add a word upon the uses of this portion of the crust of the earth, and we do so in the striking words of Hugh Miller. “We have seen how this central district of England has its storehouses of coal, iron, salt, lime,—liberal donations to the wants of the human animal, from the carboniferous, saliferous, and silurian systems; and to this we must now add its inexhaustible deposits of medicine, contributions to the general stock by the oolitic system. Along the course of the lias medicinal springs abound: there is no other part of England where they rise so thickly, or of a quality that exerts a more powerful influence on the human frame. The mineral waters of Cheltenham, for instance, so celebrated for their virtues, are of the number; and the way in which they are elaborated in such vast quantities seems to be as follows:—They all rise in the lias, a formation abounding in sulphate of iron, lime, magnesia, lignite, and various bituminous matters; but they all have their origin in the saliferous marls of the upper new red sandstone which the lias overlies. In the inferior formation they are simply brine springs, but brine is a powerful solvent. Passing through the lias, it acts upon the sulphur and the iron—becomes, by means of the acid thus set free and incorporated with it, a more powerful solvent still—operates upon the lime, upon the magnesia, upon the various lignites and bitumens—and at length rises to the surface, a brine-digested extract of liassic minerals. The several springs yield various analyses, according to the various rocks of the upper formation through which they pass; some containing more, some less lime, sulphur, iron, magnesia, but in all the dissolving menstruum is the same. And such, it would appear, is the mode in which Nature prepares her simples in this rich district, and keeps her medicine-chest ever full.”
Thus wondrous is the machinery of God’s universe; every day utters some fresh speech, and every night shows forth some new knowledge.
“The Lord of all, himself through all diffused,
Sustains and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.”
Note.—We do not like to close this chapter without mentioning the name of Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis. It is mainly to her practical talent and perseverance that we owe these relics of past ages found in the lias: the history of the British Museum will have to record this humble name, as well as that of Sir Hans Sloane, its founder. The following we borrow from Miss Zornlin’s “Recreations in Geology,” p. 197—
“Mary Anning died in 1847. Her father, by trade a carpenter, was in his own neighbourhood one of the first collectors of coorosities, as they are locally termed, such as petrified ladies’ fingers and turbots (as the fish were termed), verterbarries (vertebræ), cornemonius (ammonites), and crocodiles’ jaws (ichthyosauri), &c. He died when his daughter Mary was about ten or eleven years old; and the circumstances of the family being straitened, she went down one day to the beach to search for ‘coorosities.’ She found a fine specimen of an ammonite; and as she was coming home, a lady who met her in the street offered her half-a-crown for the fossil in her hand. Mary Anning’s future destiny was sealed. She prosecuted her searches ‘on beach,’ and in the following year (1811) observed among the ledges of the rocks a projecting bone of some animal. This enterprising girl (then only eleven years old) traced the fossil in the cliff, and hired some men to dig it out. It proved to be the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus, and has for many years formed an object of interest in the British Museum. Mary Anning afterwards sold this specimen for about 23l.”
To this we add, that in the “Memoirs of Ichthyosauri,” by Thomas Hawkins, Esq. reference is made to Miss Anning, as one “who devoted herself to science, and explored the frowning and precipitous cliffs, when the furious spring-tide conspired with the howling tempest to overthrow them, and rescued from the devouring ocean, sometimes at the peril of her life, the few specimens which originated all the facts and ingenious theories of those eminent persons, whose names must ever be remembered with sentiments of the liveliest gratitude.”