GEOLOGY OF FOLKESTONE — THE GAULT. 



355 



various floors of a lionse wlien the front wall has been completely 

 pulled away. 



No one can look at the pearly nautilus shell — the animal itself is 

 very rarely to be seen, even in a preserved state — and the common 

 native cuttle-fish of our shore, without noting at once a marked dif- 

 ference in the characters apparently presented to his view, A com- 

 parison of the animals, however, shows equally plainly that they are 

 truly members of the same natural group. So it is not to be won- 

 dered at that the early geological investigators should have failed for 

 a long time to have recognized the very various objects now known 

 to have been various solid parts of differently modified cuttle-fish as 

 referable to the class of Cephelopoda. Who, at first sight, without 

 previous training, would have imagined the dart-like sparry Belem- 

 nite and the ghttering nacreous Ammonite to be the remains of ani- 

 mals belonging to this one group ? 



The position of the ammonite in the animal kingdom was the more 

 easily made out from its general resemblance to the nautilus, vv^hose 

 pearly shell is a familiar ornament in our rooms ; but the translucent 

 spathose Belemnite sorely puzzled the early naturalists. It was 

 amongst the earliest recorded fossils, and some singular notions were 

 entertained of its origin, and some equally singular medicinal proper- 

 ties were also assigned to it. Whether or not belemnites are the 

 objects referred to as the Lyncurium by Theophrastes, or the 

 Dactylus ideeus by PHny, they are certainly noticed by Agricola 

 in 1546. 



It is curious to trace the first strange guesses made as to what 

 these objects were, und then to see how slowly, how very slowly, 

 their true nature was made out. Some took them for the tails of 

 crabs, the vertebra of snakes, the teeth of whales, &c., and they 

 were alternately referred to every class of animals from the mammal 

 to the polype ; sometimes even they were put with marine algals, 

 and lastly they were thought to be " thunder-stones." 



Greorge Agricola, to whom we have already referred, knew the 

 entire Belemnite with its alveolus, and was the first author who used 

 the generic term. Conrad Gesner, in 1565, follows with the first 

 figures of these fossils, and in 1596 we find Celespin occupying him- 

 self in attempting to make out their origin, and regarding the 



