52 IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD 



eliminate as mythical everything before the time of the later 

 Hebrew kings. Our attention is forcibly called to this by the 

 condition of the fauna of the earliest Cambrian rocks. The 

 discoveries in these in Wales, in Norway, and in America show 

 us that the seas of this early period swarmed with animals re- 

 presenting all the great types of invertebrate marine life. We 

 have here highly organized Crustaceans, Worms, Mollusks and 

 other creatures which show us that in that early age all these 

 distinct forms of life were as well separated from each other 

 as in later times, that eyes of different types, jointed limbs 

 with nerves and muscles, and a vast variety of anatomical 

 contrivances were as highly developed as at any subsequent 

 time. 1 To a Darwinian evolutionist this means nothing less 

 than that these creatures must have existed through countless 

 ages of development from their imagined simple ancestral 

 form or forms how long it is impossible to guess, since, unless 

 change was more speedy in the infancy of the earth, the term 

 of ages required must have far exceeded that from the Cam- 

 brian to the Modern. Yet, to represent all this we have abso- 

 lutely nothing except Eozoon in its solitary grandeur, and a 



1 Walcott and Matthew record more than 160 species of 67 genera, in- 

 cluding Sponges, Zoophytes, Echinoderms, Brachiopods, Bivalve and 

 Univalve shellfishes, Trilobites and other Crustaceans from the Lower 

 Cambrian of the United States of America and Canada alone ; and these 

 are but a portion of the inhabitants of the early Cambrian seas. There is 

 a rich Scandinavian fauna of the same early date, and in England and 

 Wales, Sailer, Hicks and Lapworth have described many fossils of the 

 basal Cambrian. From year to year, also, discoveries of fossil remains are 

 being made, both in America and Europe, in beds of older date than those 

 previously known to be fossil iferous. At present, however, these remains 

 are still few and imperfectly known, and it is not in all cases certain 

 whether the beds in which they occur are pre-Cambrian or belong to the 

 lowest members of that great system. It is unfortunate that so many 

 of the strata between the Laurentian and the Cambrian seem to be of a 

 character little likely to contain fossils ; being littoral deposits produced 

 in times of much physical disturbance. Yet there must have been con- 

 temporaneous beds of a different character, which may yet be discovered. 



