SUDDEN INTERMENT OF FOSSIL LOLIGO. 307 
extinct species prepared also with their own ink; 
with this fossil ink I might record the fact, and 
explain the causes of its wonderful preservation. 
I might register the proofs of instantaneous death 
detected in these ink-bags, for they contain the 
fluid which the Jiving sepia emits in the moment 
of alarm ; and might detail further evidence of 
their immediate burial, in the retension of the 
forms of these distended membranes (PI. 29. 
Figs. 3 — 10.) ; since they would speedily have 
decayed, and have spilt their ink, had they been 
exposed but a few hours to decomposition in the 
water. The animals must therefore have died 
suddenly, and been quickly buried in the sedi- 
ment 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 have elsewhere appHed this line of argument to prove 
the sudden destruction and burial of the Saurians, whose skele- 
tons we find entire in the same Lias that contains the pens and 
ink-bags of Loligo. On the other hand, we have proofs of inter- 
vals between the depositions of the component strata of the Lias, 
in the fact, that many beds of this formation have become the 
repository of Coprolites, dispersed singly and irregularly at inter- 
vals far distant from one another, and at a distance from any 
entire skeletons of the Saurians, from which they were derived ; 
and in the further fact, that those surfaces only of the Coprolites, 
which lay uppermost at the bottom of the sea, have often 
