100 SUPERPOSITION NOT PABENTAL RELATION 



SUPERrOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION 

 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



Several thousand years ago, ere the upheaval of the last of 

 our raised beaches, there existed somewhere on the British 

 toast a submarine bed, rich in sea-weed and the less destruc- 

 tible zoophytes, and inhabited by the commoner crustacese 

 and molluscs. Shoals of herrings frequented it every autumn, 

 haunted by their usual enemies the dog-fish, the cod, and the 

 porpoise ; and during the other seasons of the year it was 

 swum over by the ling, the hake, and the turbot A con- 

 siderable stream, that traversed a wide extent of marshy 

 country, waving with flags and reeds, and in which the frog 

 and the newt bred by millions, entered the sea a few hundred 

 yards away, and bore down, when in flood, its modicum of 

 reptilian remains, some of which, sinking over the submarine 

 bed, found a lodgment at the bottom. Portions of reeds and 

 flags were also occasionally entombed, with now and then 

 boughs of the pine and juniper, swept from the higher grounds. 

 Through frequent depositions of earthy matter brought down 

 by the streamlet, and of sand thrown up by the sea, a gra- 

 dual elevation of the bottom went on, till at length the deep- 

 sea bed came to exist as a shallow bank, over which birds of 



