62 
THE SILURIAN BEACH. 
slioro of the German Ocean. I have found in 
those deposits alone one hundred and ten kinds 
of fossil fishes. To judge of the total number 
of species belonging to those early ages by the 
number known to e*xist now is about as reason 
able as to infer that because Aristotle, familiar 
only with the waters of Greece, recorded less 
than three hundred kinds of fishes in his limited 
fishing-ground, therefore these were all the fishes 
then living. The fishing-ground of the geologist 
in the Silurian and Devonian periods is even 
more circumscribed than his, and belongs, be- 
sides, not to a living, but to a dead world, far 
more difficult to decipher. 
But the sciences of Geology and Palasontology 
are making such rapid progress, now that they 
go hand in hand, that our familiarity with past 
creations is daily increasing. We know already 
that extinct animals exist all over the world : 
heaped together under the snows of Siberia, — 
lying thick beneath the Indian soil, — found 
wherever English settlers till the ground or work 
the mines of Australia, — figured in the old En- 
cyclopaedias of China, where the Chinese philoso- 
phers have drawn them with the accuracy of their 
nation, — built into the most beautiful temples 
of classic lands, for even the stones of the Par- 
thenon are full of the fragments of these old fos- 
sils, and if any chance had directed the .attention 
