PAPERS ON GEOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY 341 



ultation echoed and re-echoed along the bluffs. I have 

 read that the Director of the Geological Survey while on 

 one of the mountains of Canada split open a rock and dis- 

 covered therein a large perfect specimen of trilobite, that 

 precursor of our modern crab, and he, too, yelled in tri- 

 umph. I can assure you that when you go fishing with a 

 hammer and split open a slab of slate and behold there 

 the whole series of the teeth of a shark or the graceful 

 outline of a large nautilus, or the glistening armor of a 

 ganoid, you, also, will be tempted to make your pleasure 

 audible. 



But it all seems very strange that life should have ex- 

 isted so long ago on the earth and that there should be 

 such a multiplicity of fonns. Our own county furnishes 

 a unique illustration. You may sit on a slab of slate in 

 Spoon river bank and perhaps haul out bass, catfish, 

 perch or sunfish, and then with your hammer find in the 

 slate remnants of fish unlike anything that you have 

 caught and that existed probably millions of years ago. 



