SUDDEN INTERMENT OF FOSSIL LOLIGO. 233 



in these ink-bags, for they contain the fluid which the living 

 sepia emits in the moment of alarm ; and might detail 

 farther evidence of their immediate burial, in the retention 

 of the forms of these distended membranes (PI. 29, Figs. 3 

 — 10 ;) since they w^ould speedily have decayed, and have 

 spilt their ink, had they been exposed but a few hours to de- 

 composition in the water. The animals must therefore have 

 died suddenly, and been quickly buried in the sediment that 

 formed the strata, in which their petrified ink and ink-bags 

 are thus preserved. The preservation also of so fragile a 

 substance as the pen of a Loligo, retaining traces even of 

 its minutest fibres of growth, is not much less remarkable 

 than the fossil condition of the ink-bags, and leads to similar 

 conclusions.* 



We learn from a recent German publication (Zeiten's 

 Versteinerungen Wiirttembergs. Stuttgart, 1832, PI. 25 

 and PL 37,) that similar remains of pens and ink-bags are 

 of frequent occurrence in the Lias shale of x\alen and Boll.f 



* V^c have elsewhere applied this line of argument to prove the sudden 

 destruction and burial of the Saurians, whose skeletons we find entire in the 

 same Lias that contains the pens and ink-bags of Loligo. On the other 

 liand, wc have proofs of intervals between the depositions of the component 

 strata of the Lids, in tlio fact, that many beds of this formation have become 

 the repository of CoproHtes, dispersed singly and irregularly at intervals far 

 distant from one another, and at a distance from any entire skeletons, of the 

 Saurians, from which tiiey were derived ; and in the farther fact, that those 

 surfaces only of the Coprolites, which lay vppcrmost at the [bottom of the 

 sea, have often suffered partial destruction from the action of water before 

 they were covered and protected by tlie muddy sediment that has afterwards 

 permanently enveloped them. Farther proof of the duration of time, during 

 t!:c intervals of the deposition of tlie Lias, is found in the innumerable 

 multitudes of the shells of various Mollusks and Conchifers which had 

 time to arrive at maturity, at the bottom of the sea, during the quiescent 

 periods which intervened between the muddy invasions that destroyed, and 

 buried suddenly the creatures inhabiting the waters, at the time and place 

 of their arrival. 



t As far as we can judge from the delineations and lines of the struc- 

 ture in Zeiten'd plate, our species from Lyme Regis is the same \vi:h 



20* 



