THE NATURAL] 



^ 



ON THE 

 NATURAL ORDER OF ANCIENT GEOLOGIC ORGANISMS. 



BY F. M. BURTON, ESQ. 



Every student in zoology, who has at all examined the systems of our 

 great naturalists in the past and present time, is doubtless at first inva- 

 riably struck with the want of a pure classification of the Animal King- 

 dom, that will shew without fail the gradual increased development of one 

 creation over another, in at least one important organism; and looking at 

 the inconsistencies that prevail throughout nature in this matter, he is apt 

 to think that the true classifying principle has not yet been discovered, 

 that the master minds that have from time to time attempted to elucidate 

 the secrets of nature, and to separate the true gold from the rock where 

 it lies buried, our Cuviers and Owens have yet failed to find out the key 

 which will give access to the whole, the one true principle of all organic 

 created matter. He remembers that nature never recedes, and this is apt 

 to confound him more, and further strengthens the belief he fosters, and 

 then a spirit of inquiry is raised within him, and he searches deep into 

 the works of those who have made zoologic development, as it exists in 

 the present fauna of the earth, their study, but without getting nearer the 

 goal. He then recollects that the whole world of organisms, as it now 

 exists, is merely a portion, part decaying, part decayed, of one vast fabric 

 of creation, which has been going on for ages, and then he takes a wider 

 sweep, and endeavours to understand the link between ancient and modern 

 cycles, as shewn in the geologic records of the past, and here he sees at 

 last nature as a whole, and finds what man's wisdom has discovered, though 

 failing in perfection, is yet worked out on true creative principles. 



But to put the question in a more forcible light, let us take the several 

 great divisions of the Animal Kingdom according to modern classification, 

 and compare them one with another, and then let us mark how it is that 

 we do not find the lowest class of one division higher in point of organic 

 development than the highest of the last class, as, for instance, the Anne- 

 lidas, the lowest of the Homogangliate division, over the Echinoderms, the 

 highest of the preceding Nematoneurose division. The answer to this, when 



VOL. VIII. B 



