19 
Glittering in the original hues of their shells, odd beyond all others 
in their shapes, they seem to call out for recognition. What 
wonder if they excited the interest and puzzled the minds of men 
before the science of geology was called into existence. What 
wonder if they gave rise to legends and traditions which have now 
become as interesting as the fossils themselves. Snake-stones— 
what a natural name to give them ; petrified, coiled up, snakes— 
the readiest explanation of their existence. Curiously always 
devoid of a head, though this deficiency has often been ingeniously 
supplied by local fossil merchants. But how petrified in such 
numbers? Sir Walter Scott tells us in Marmion how the nuns of 
Whitby gathered in the evening round the fire, relating tales of the 
wonders wrought by their patroness. They told how 
Of thousand snakes each one 
Was changed into a coil of stone 
When holy Hilda prayed. 
For it appears that the holy maidens who dwelt at the Convent of 
Whitby were much distressed by the snakes infesting its precincts, 
and that the abbess at length succeeded in her request that they 
might be beheaded and petrified. And so there they are at this 
day to the discomfiture of all who delight in their own incredulity. 
Let us pick out a few of them, and question them relative to 
their origin and history. If we are interested in the half-ruined 
dwellings of vanished races of men in the uninhabited wilds of 
America, or the desolate forests of India, how much more so must 
we needs be in regarding these habitations of a family of creatures 
that literally swarmed in the early seas. Not a bed of rock or clay 
from the Severn to the Wash, from the English Channel to the 
Yorkshire Moors, that does not yield them by hundreds. They 
boast of an antiquity before which that of pre-historic man fades 
into nothingness. Frail creatures in themselves, with soft fleshy 
bodies, they secreted from those bodies the dwellings which still 
survive. 
They belong to the sub-kingdom known. to zoologists as the 
Mollusca—a set of animals wholly soft in structure, and with no 
skeleton whatever— the set which includes our snails, oysters, 
slugs, cuttlefishes and others of that ik represented on the diagram. 
To the geologist this is the most important section of the animal 
world, for by the traces its members have left behind, he for the 
- most part is enabled to classify rocks. And it is nearly the oldest 
section too, for the most ancient fossiliferous rocks of Great Britain 
_ —those called the Camorian give us specimens. 
| But it is a wide, far-reaching snb-kingdom, and our Ammonites 
belong to its highest class, the Cephalopoda, represented at present 
__ by the Cuttle-fish, Octopus, and Nautilus. 
= 
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