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THE GEOLOGIST. 



These Oldhamise are supposed to be related to the horny zoophytes 

 (Hydroid polyps), such as the Sertularia, and the other flexible, 

 feathery, horny corals, which, drifted ashore by the waves, are blown 

 about on our beaches. In each of the cells of these horny Sertularian 

 polypidoms, when living, was an animal possessed of numerous 

 tentacles, and of a simple stomach-sac. Each was connected by a 

 common stem to the others, so that each polypidom would be regarded 

 as either a living animal mass with numerous heads, or, more 

 properly, as a connected colony of individuals never completely 

 separated from their parents, out of which, like the branches of a 

 vegetable, they budded and grew. 



Some have thought these Oldhamiae to have been animals allied to 

 the flexible branching Bryozoans, such as our common Salicornaria 

 farciminoides, which has a more highly organized system of digestive 

 organs. 



Thus, if our first traces of it are to be depended upon, organic 

 life has not begun with the lowest grades, nor with the highest. In 

 the sediments of those first sea-washed shores, it is not the shapeless 

 sponge, which, without locomotive capacity, lazily imbibed the briny 

 fluid by one set of pores to drive it out in streams from others, nor 

 the simple foraminifer, whose traces of existence we find ; nor was it 

 man, of highest organization, who has left his footprints upon those 

 first silent shores. The ancient lug-worm, formed of rings, and 

 no't abhorrent, like the earth-worm, in its red and unctuous look, 

 but radiant with gay colours, and beautiful to look at, like the 

 sea-worms and nereides of our shores ; and, from their food consisting 

 of decaying vegetable and animal matter, indicating therefore the 

 existence then of sea-weeds, or of the minuter forms of animal life — 

 the Sertulian zoophytes, ever and anon protruding their beautiful 

 circles of hyaline and feathery tentacles, grasping their tiny, almost 

 microscopic prey, — and the crustaceous Trilobite, all well developed 

 and by no means simple forms of animal construction. These, and 

 simple but largish sea- weeds, are the first fossils the most searching 

 inquiries have as yet discovered, and, as far as we yet know, these 

 were all that lived or grew on those primeval shores, on which nor 

 waves nor ripples landed the glittering fish; for, as far as we yet 



