A ANCIENT GEOLOGIC ORGANISMS. 



viewed by the experienced eye of the advanced geologist, is obvious. 



In the first place it must be borne in mind that it would not be 

 necessary, from local causes, that the lowest class of one division, and each 

 tribe of animals, should in all respects be more fully organized than the 

 highest preceding lower class or tribe, because the development of one or 

 more organisms would entirely depend upon the circumstances of life in 

 which each animal is placed; the inhabitant of the water, for instance, 

 would not require certain senses and organs so highly elaborated as those 

 of another species whose habits were terrestrial, and vice versa. But the 

 chief answer to the inquiry lies in this, and the fact has been partly worked 

 out and elucidated in the last work of one of our great geologists, whose 

 end we all lament, that of "The Testimony of the Rocks," by Hugh 

 Miller, who makes the simple statement that the various creations, so to 

 speak, of the different divisions of the Animal Kingdom were an act of 

 parallelism. Too much stress cannot be laid on this important fact. This 

 is the key which will unlock the truth of advanced systems, and throw a 

 light over the whole, when we come to consider that the lowest organisms 

 with which we are acquainted were the first to be developed, and that, 

 when the great Silurian sea was in being, with its muddy, slimy shores, 

 the acritous animals held sway. True it is we cannot find traces of the 

 remains of many, whose types of form we still are acquainted with in 

 existing life, in the rocks where now their history is read, but the reason 

 of this is apparent — their bodies were evanescent, and no more traces of 

 them could have been left than of the soft jelly-fishes of our own shores, 

 which, when thrown up by the waves, before the returning tide can reach 

 them, are melted by the sun's rays, and disappear. 



But were acritous animals alone permitted to live on those ancient shores? 

 Nature, ever bountiful, and delighting in liberality, or rather nature's 

 ' consummate Author, willed it otherwise. Co-existent with acritous develop- 

 ment appeared also tribes of the great Nematonourose, Homogangliate, and 

 Heterogangliate divisions, — nature worked in parallels. Together with the 

 bonj' secretions of Polyps, we find Trilobites and Braohiopodous Molluscs, 

 nay, from the soft nature of the lower orders allowing them to perish 

 without an impress of their form, the latter kinds almost appear to pre- 

 dominate. And further, in addition to this divisional creative parallelism, 

 it appears that in the four first kingdoms a certain parallelism also existed 

 in the several classes composing each division, as, for instance, among the 

 Heterogangliata; for, co-existent with low Brachiopods, we find imbedded 

 in Silurian stone remains of the highest families of this division, Cephalo- 

 podous Molluscs, animals that approach the vertebrate world in type by 

 the possession of the first rudimentary bony skeleton, though again we are 

 confounded in our attempt to understand the creative truth by the light 



