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 living sepia emits in the moment 
ef alarm • and might detail further evidence of 
their immediate burial, in the retension of the 
forms of these distended membranes (PI. 29. 
Pigs. 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 qnickhj 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 
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- 
hags, and leads to similar conclusions.* 
* We have elsewhere applied 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 
•*ik-bags of Loligo. On the other hand, we have proofs of inter- 
yals between the depositions of the component strata of the Lias, 
the fact, that many beds of this formation have become the 
^spository of Coprolites, dispersed singly and irregularly at inter- 
^ s far distant from one another, and at a distance from any 
^”t’re skeletons of the Saurians, from which they were derived ; 
in the further fact, that those surfaces only of the Coprolites, 
'<^h lay uppermost at the bottom of the sea, have often 
