CAN WE FIND THE BEGINNING OF LIFE? 351 



Because in Bohemia, Great Britain, and portions of 

 North America, the lowest unmetamorphosed strata yet 

 discovered, contain but slight traces of life. Sir R. Murchi- 

 son conceives that they were formed while yet few, if any, 

 plants or animals had been created ; and, therefore, classes 

 them as " Azoic." His own pages, however, show the 

 illegitimacy of the conclusion that there existed at that 

 period no considerable amount of life. Such traces of life 

 as have been found in the Longmynd rocks, for many years 

 considered unfossiliferous, have been found in some of the 

 lowest beds ; and the twenty thousand feet of superposed 

 beds, still yield no organic remains. If now these super- 

 posed strata throughout a depth of four miles, are without 

 fossils, though the strata over which they lie prove that 

 life had commenced ; what becomes of Sir R. Murchison's 

 inference ? At page 189 of Siluria^ a still more conclusive 

 fact will be found. The " Glengariff grits," and other 

 accompanying strata there described as 13,500 feet thick, 

 contain no signs of contemporaneous life. Yet Sir R. Mur- 

 chison refers them to the Devonian period — a period that 

 had a large and varied marine Fauna. How then, from 

 the absence of fossils in the Longmynd beds and their 

 equivalents, can we conclude that the Earth was " azoic " 

 when they were formed ? 



"But," it may be asked, "if living creatures then exist 

 ed, why do we not find fossiliferous strata of that age, or 

 an earlier age ? " One reply is, that the non-existence of 

 such strata is but a negative fact — we have not found them. 

 And considering how little we know even of the two-fifths 

 of the Earth's surface now above the sea, and how absolute- 

 ly ignorant we are of the three-fifths below the sea, it is 

 rash to say that no such strata exist. But the chief reply 

 IS, that these records of the Earth's earlier history have 

 been in great part destroyed, by agencies that are ever 

 tending to destroy such records. 



