180 GEOLOGY OF OHIO. 
have been taken the remains of fifty distinct species, less than a half 
dozen of which have been found elsewhere. 
This coal mine at Linton may be regarded, therefore, as a kind of loop- 
hole through which we see, in all its details, the life of one locality in the 
great world of the Carboniferous age. Looking through that, we have 
before our eyes a little pool of water swarming with fishes of various 
kinds, some of them very large, clad in mail and provided with most for- 
midable sets of trenchant teeth; others, small but exceedingly numerous, 
covered with enameled and highly ornamented scales and plates. These 
latter, as we learn by coprolitic masses, were the prey of the larger ones. ~ 
With the fishes were a large number of aquatic carnivorous salaman- 
ders, some of which must have been eight or ten feet in length, and as 
formidably armed as the larger fishes. Others were snake-like in form, 
yet several feet in length, bristling with spines, or protected by thick 
and bony scales. Others still were a few inches in length, very slender 
and delicate, and, as we know by their mutilated fragments, served as 
food for the more powerful. 
A remarkable circumstance connected with the Linton deposit is this: 
that in working up some hundreds of tons of the cannel coal which con- 
tains the fishes and amphibians, we have obtained not a fragment of an 
insect, and only a few small and imperfect remains of crustaceans. Mol- 
lusks, too, are entirely absent, no shell of any kind being found there, 
except those of Spirorbis, which is thought to have been an annelid. 
These occur, however, in millions, and we may infer from the multitudes 
of these delicate organisms that the water they inhabited was quiet, 
warm, and almost stagnant. Whether salt or fresh, we do not know, but 
it seems to me most probable that it was fresh. 
Very few remains of plants have been found in the Linton cannel, and 
these, if leaves, are skeletonized, showing their long maceration in water. 
In this, as in many other respects, the Linton deposit is strikingly dif- 
ferent from that of Mazon Creek, Illinois, which has yielded a large num- 
ber of insects, crustaceans, and plants, and very few fishes and amphibians. 
The entire distinctness of the fossils found in the two localities referred 
to—though they are of nearly the same geological age—further illus- 
trates the richness of the fauna of the Coal Measure epoch, and teaches 
us that what we see of it, varied and interesting as it is, can give us but 
a very imperfect idea of the life of the Coal period. 
