180 GEOLOGY OF OHIO. 



have been taken the remains of fifty distinct -species, less than a half 

 dozen of which have been found elsewhere. 



This coal mine at Linton may be regarded, therefore, as a kind of loop- 

 hole through which we see, in all its details, the life of one locality in the 

 great world of the Carboniferous agp. Looking through that, we have 

 before our eyes a little pool of water swaTming with fishes of various 

 kinds, some of them very large, clad in mail and provided with most for- 

 midable sets of trenchant teeth ; others, small but exceedingly numerous, 

 covered with enameled and highly ornamented scales and plates. These 

 latter, as we learn by coprolitio masses, were the prey of the larger ones. 



With the fishes were a large number of aquatic carnivorous salaman- 

 ders, some of which must have been eight or ten feet in length, and as 

 formidably armed as the larger fishes. Others were- snake-like in form, 

 yet several feet in length, bristling with spines, or protected by thick 

 and bony scales. Others still were a few inches in length, very slender 

 and delicate, and, as we know by their mutilated fragments, served as 

 food for the more powerful. 



A remarkable circumstance connected with the Linton deposit is this: 

 that in working up some hundreds of tons of the cannel coal which con- 

 tains the fishes and amphibians, we have obtained not a fragment of an 

 insect, and only a few small and imperfect remains of crustaceans. Mol- 

 lusks, too, are entirely absent, no shell of any kind being found there, 

 except those of Spirorbis, which is thought to have been an annelid. 

 These occur, however, in millions, and we may infer from the multitudes 

 of these delicate organisms that the water they inhabited was quiet, 

 warm, and almost stagnant. Whether salt or fresh, we do not know, but 

 it seems to me most probable that it was fresh. 



Very few remains of plants have been found in the Linton cannel, and 

 these, if leaves, are skeletonized, showing their long maceration in water. 

 In this, as in many other respects, the Linton deposit is strikingly dif- 

 ferent from that of Mazon Creek, Illinois, which has yielded a large num- 

 ber of insects, crustaceans, and plants, and very few fishes and amphibians. 



The- entire distinctness of the fossils found in the two localities referred 

 to — though they are of nearly the same geological age — further illus- 

 trates the richness of the fauna of the Coal Measure epoch, and teaches 

 us that what we see of it, varied and interesting as it is, can give us but 

 a very imperfect idea of the life of the Coal period. 



