85 



other wondrous and inscrutable agency, a process altogether different 

 from either of those supposed, these mausoleums of countless myriads 

 of once living beings (now fossil Infusoria) were produced ; — I feel 

 myself incompetent to surmise, having but little acquaintance with 

 those sciences which bear upon this subject of acknowledged difficul- 

 ty. But certain it is that mere appearances would seem to justify the 

 first hypothesis of sudden transformation, however it may militate 

 against the more favoured opinions of geologists, versed also in the 

 science of chemical agency. It cannot fail to arrest attention, that 

 delicate as is the structure of these minutissimal creatures, there is 

 not, in by far the greatest proportion of them, any appearance of dis- 

 tortion, pressure, or injury of any kind ; they seem to have been sud- 

 denly arrested in the full enjoyment of life, developing (so far as form 

 and perfect structure can evidence the fact) every indication of anima- 

 tion exhibited by the recent species, up to the very moment of their 

 transformation from the living to the fossil animalcule. I offer these 

 observations with diffidence, not as opinions formed, but as queries 

 from one who, though deeply interested in the pursuit and advance- 

 ment of science generally, has no pretension to any attainments in 

 those sciences in particular, which more immediately relate to the 

 subject of these last observations. They are made with a view to eli- 

 cit information, and to lead to further research. Upon the present 

 subject Dr. Mantell's remarks better harmonize with the more gene- 

 rally received opinions on the formation of flint in chalk. " This ar- 

 rangement," he observes " has probably arisen from the chalk and 

 flint having been held in suspension or solution in the same fluid, and 

 precipitated into the bottom of the ocean, when consolidation took 

 place, the siliceous molecules separated from the cretaceous, on the 

 well-known principle of chemical affinity, the sponges and other Zo- 

 ophytes acting as nuclei or centres, around which the siliceous matter 

 coagulated." * 



But whatever be the mode or the agency by which the changes 

 were effected in those conditions of the earth's surface, which cha- 

 racterize the Cretaceous period, we have, in these flints, records of 

 animal existence, as convincing and irrefragable as in those more gi- 

 gantic memorials of the earth's inhabitants in former epochs of its 

 dark history, whether in the form of the Icthyosauri, the Iguanodon, 

 or the fossil remains of beings of still more remote antiquity. We 

 have, in every section of a flint nodule, proofs that in the former 



* ' Wonders of Geology,' vol. i. 294, Ed. 1840. 



