THE MICRO8COPI8T IN BERMUDA. 121 



these successive segments are added, will result the peculiar form 

 which is characteristic of each species, whether a whorl, a spiral, 

 a cone, a disc, or any one of an immense variety of shapes. 

 There is a beauty and a symmetry about the foraminiferal shells 

 that make them peculiarly interesting objects under the micro- 

 scope. Some are exquisitely fluted, or dotted, or lined. Some 

 are of the purest white, others like glass, and in the form of 

 most beautiful vases or bottles, while others glisten like porcelain. 

 The curves and the whorls are always exceedingly graceful, and 

 the rulings beautifully regular. I have often wondered what all 

 this display was for, when there were no eyes to see it. Why 

 such a wonderful geometry of curves, when there was no mind 

 to appreciate it. 



But the class of animals we are now considering, derives per- 

 haps its greatest interest from its past history. It was amazingly 

 abundant in the old geological ages. The nummulitic lime stone 

 of the Alps, which is made up in chief part of the coin-like 

 shells of forarninifera, is in places ten thousand feet thick, and 

 extends under nearly all of Southern Europe. The building 

 stone of Paris is from its quarries, and the pyramids of Egypt 

 are made out of it. 



The Eozoan Canadense, which is the earliest trace of anything 

 living found in the rocks, belongs to this class of animals. It is 

 the largest of the foraminifera, sometimes several feet in diam- 

 eter, made up of corrugated plates of carbonate of lime, between 

 which was the sarcode body of the animal. On the bottoms 

 of the earliest seas which covered the still warm crust of our 

 globe, the Eozoan formed immense reefs, which are now the 

 serpentine limestone so abundant in the Laurentian strata of 

 Canada and other parts of the world. 



It is singular that this simplest of all animal structures should 

 have survived without change, except in its shelly covering, from 

 the earliest dawn of life on the earth, through all the long eras up 

 to the present time. It seems that evolution and the survival of 

 the fittest, if they had any thing to do in the matter, could find 

 no being that was better suited to live on shallow sea-bottoms 

 than this undeveloped creature. I imagine that as long as the 



