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THE GEOLOGIST. 
These Oldhamise are supposed to be related to the homy zoophytes 
(Hydroid polyps), such as tlie Sertularia, aud the other flexible, 
feathery, horuy 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 simjile 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 Oldhamite 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 iipon those 
first silent shores. The ancient lug-worm, formed of rings, and 
not 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, gi-asping 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 lai'gish 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 
