274 COSMOS. 



yields the colour with which its image may be drawn.* In 

 other, strata again, nothing remains but the faint impression of 

 a muscle-shell, but even this, if it belong to a main division of 

 mollusca,f may serve to show the traveller, in some distant 

 land, the nature of the rock in which it is found, and the 

 organic remains with which it is associated. Its discovery 

 gives the history of the country in which it occurs. 



The analytic study of primitive animal and vegetable life 

 has taken a double direction; the one is purely morphological, 

 and embraces, especially, the natural history and physio- 

 logy of organisms, filling up the chasms in the series of still 

 living species by the fossil structures of the primitive world. 

 The second is more specially geognostic, considering fossil 

 remains in their relations to the superposition and relative 

 age of the sedimentary formations. The former has long 

 predominated over the latter, and an imperfect and superficial 

 comparison of fossil remains with existing species has led 

 to errors, which may still be traced in the extraordinary 

 names applied to certain natural bodies. It was sought to 

 identify all fossil species with those still extant in the same 

 manner as, in the sixteenth century, men were led by false 

 analogies to compare the animals of the New Continent with 



* A discovery made by Miss Mary Aiming, who was likewise the 

 discoverer of the coprolites of fish. These coprolites, and the excre- 

 ments of the ichthyosauri, have been found in such abundance in England 

 (as for instance near Lyme Regis), that, according to Buckland's ex- 

 pression, they lie like potatoes scattered in the ground. See Buck- 

 land, Geology considered with reference to Natural Theology, vol. i. 

 pp. 188-202 and 305. With respect to the hope expressed by Hooke 

 " to raise a chronology" from the mere study of broken and fossilized 

 shells "and to state the interval of time wherein such or such catastrophes 

 and mutations have happened/' see his Posthumous Works, Lecture, 

 Feb. 29, 1688. 



[Still more wonderful is the preservation of the substance of the 

 animal of certain cephalopoda in the Oxford clay. In some specimens 

 recently obtained, and described by Professor Owen, not only the ink- 

 bag, but the muscular mantle, the head, and its crown of arms, are all 

 preserved in connection with the belemnite shell, while one specimen 

 exhibits the large eyes and the funnel of the animal, and the remains of 

 two fins, in addition to the shell and the ink-bag. See Ansted's Ancient 

 World, p. 147.] TV. 



. *} Leop. von Buch, in the AWiandlungen der Alcad. der Wtss. zoi 

 Berlin in dem J. 1837, s. 64. 



