343 
ON THE OLDEST KNOWN FOSSIL, EOZOON GANA- 
DENSE OF THE LAURENTIAN EOCKS OF CANADA; 
ITS PLACE, STEUCTURE,' AND SIGNIFICANCE. 
BY PROFESSOR T. RUPERT JONES, E.G.S. 
W E all know that it was a long time before even naturalists 
fully understood that fossil shells were not created 
by God in the bowels of the earth, but bred at sea 
(J. Woodward) ; and* though hazel-nuts in peat, and bones in 
gravel, spoke for themselves as imbedded relics of plants and 
animals, yet their lessons were long neglected ; the big bones 
went for fabulous giants ; and shells, fish-teeth, tree-stumps, 
and so forth belonged only to curiosity -mongers and ^^the 
deluge.'’^ In time, however, by the natural links of cause 
and effect, layers of fossil shells were rightly connected with 
old sea-beds or lake-bottoms, and petrified oysters and cockles 
were no longer regarded as having been washed by a cata- 
clysm into supposed crevices and caverns, or as having been 
mixed up in a fancied diluvial magma. But long after many 
of the layers of shelly rock, coral-limestones, or other strata 
with well preserved fossils, had been duly recognized as suc- 
cessive beds of shifting seas, that had come and gone over this 
or that part of the eartKs surface, the rock-masses still lower 
down, — grauwacke and slates, schists, gneiss, and granite, 
remained to be understood. 
By Sedgwick, Murchison, and others the indefinite grau- 
wacke was stript of its obscurity ; its folds and ridges, often 
complicated and distorted, broken and shifted, were traced 
out and got to order ; its fossils were brought to light ; and 
Devonian,^^ Silurian,^^ and Cambrian came out like 
the reading of half-burnt papyri in Herculaneum. As for the 
primary schistus,^^ — the crystalline crust of a cooling globe, 
with seas of boiling water, rearranging the dust of a primaeval 
granite in contorted beds of mica, quartz, and felspar, and in 
thick layers 6f felspathic mud, — this was one form in which 
the mineralogical nature and apparent structure of the schis- 
tose rocks were made to hold together. The intrusion of 
molten rock, dragging out some of its plastic mass into 
riband-like gneiss, and crystallizing as granite in axial moun- 
