IDENTIFICATION BY FOSSILS 263 



Charybdis. But no one would pretend that sediments 

 alone could be trusted as a means of identification of strata; 

 the remarkably slow progress made in the study of ter- 

 restrial history so long as this was the sole criterion is an 

 indication of its inefficiency. 



It was William Smith's merit to make known for the 

 first time another character, and of a more trustworthy 

 kind, by which the strata could be traced under their 

 varying disguises from one region to another. 



Without knowledge of zoology, even of such zoology 

 as was current at the time, this acute observer, with 

 unrivalled sagacity, arrived at the conclusion that the 

 fossils contained in the strata were not only the remains 

 of once living organisms, that Steno had already shown, 

 that they were not only the remains of extinct forms of 

 life, that Pallisy the potter had divined, but that they are 

 peculiar to the several groups of strata in which they 

 occur, and, indeed, peculiar to the time in which these 

 beds were formed. He was thus the first to behold with 

 an inward eye the ancient populations of the earth which 

 he summoned from the far- vanished past. Now we have 

 learnt to see with his eyes they throng upon us in myriad 

 forms, no two the same, each distinguished by some trick 

 or fashion from his fellows, a wonderful phantasmagoria 

 of varied shapes. In quaint and wonderful ways Life has 

 fashioned her garment, the threads are all one and the 

 same, and they run through to the beginning of time, but 

 they are woven in forms and colours that change with each 

 flash of her shuttle ; the same form is never repeated, and 

 the new is always more wonderful than the old. Thus has 

 Life worked to music of changing time. Sometimes she 

 has drooped droningly over the loom, sometimes urged it 

 eagerly to violent measure, sometimes, too, followed a 

 motif that lay dormant, as half forgotten, for awhile, and 

 was then resumed to an exultant conclusion in the ap- 



