The good example which has been set us by Mr. Salter to look out for traces of mechanical and vital agencies in the Cambrian beds is worthy to be followed by every brother of the hammer; and instead of waiting, like Micawber, for “something to turn up,” to set heartily to work and turn up the stones for ourselves. It is well known what good work Mr. Salter has done in the Cambrians of the Longmynd, towards clearing up the circumstances under which those rocks were deposited, as well as in tracing the remains of their ancient life; but much remains to be done ere this formation is as well known as the others. One thing, however, is certain, that the Cambrians and the Drift are at present the “lions” of the geological world, so that the study need not suffer on the ground of unpopularity.

Being out one day (during a recent visit to the Isle of Man), at Dalby, where the Cambrian rocks are quarried for flags by a newly-formed slate-company, I observed that many of the slabs were most decidedly ripple-marked. This is, I believe, the first time that such appearances have been observed in the island; indeed, with the exception of some doubtful fucoids, no fossils have been met with in these beds.

It would be obviously inappropriate to discuss in the pages of the ‘Geologist’ the theories propounded in Dr. Pouchet's celebrated work, with respect to the heterogenetic production of beings of simple organization from inorganic particles; but as the learned author has devoted the whole of his sixth chapter, comprising sixty-seven octavo pages, to the discussion of the “geological proofs” on which he has based his theory, we cannot avoid offering to our readers a slight sketch of the arguments M. Pouchet so eloquently propounds.

His theory is thus stated:—At various epochs, of which no chronology can offer an idea, inert matter has been formed into organized beings, without the aid of any pre-existent organism. This, he says, is a natural consequence of geology, which none will dispute. He further deduces that there has been, subsequent to this first act of creation, other generations, and that perhaps at the present day new species are being called into existence. If a Supreme Being, who manifests His unity over every portion of the globe, has eternally and universally presided over all the phenomena which take place on its surface; and if it has been His pleasure to people the earth with tribes of plants and animals which have succeeded on it, why may He not be repeating at the present day that which He has already done during past times? As P. Gorini has said, spontaneous generation is not a more marvellous phenomenon than ordinary reproduction; and M. Pouchet cannot conceive why it is regarded as such an extraordinary act. Nature is not abandoned to the disorder of chance; she is governed by harmonious laws, and each act which is accomplished in her depths is connected with the past and is lost in the future: each generation which appears is only the corollary of that which has preceded it (p. 461).

It is extraordinary how many people have an obliquity in their mental vision. Some mentally never see straight at all, but look at everything askew. These are harmless people; you know them at once, and pity their defects, just as you do a person with a downright squint. But those who have a slight cast in the eye are the most dangerous; you are not aware they occasionally squint; you do not perceive, perhaps after even a close scrutiny, that there is anything amiss with their vision at all. So it is with the mental cast; you do not observe it, as a general rule, for it is only now and then it shows itself.

When the Antiquity of Man was first proclaimed from the discovery of the Abbeville flints by Boucher de Perthes, no one believed it. Everybody thought him like the mad man who swore all the world was mad; and so it seemed, then, as if all the world had mental obliquity of vision, which made them declare our savant of Abbeville to be labouring under a delusion. When, however, Rigollet, Prestwich, Flower, Lyell, Evans, and others of the goodly company of geologists,—as unbelieving, however, as so many St. Thomases,— went, saw, and returned believing, the fame of Boucher de Perthes' discoveries gained ground.

One of the commonest fossils of the chalk in the London district is the beautiful Sea-Urchin, of which we here give two figures, from examples in the national collection. It was named by Dr. Mantell, in honour of Mr. Charles König, the distinguished German savant, who in his youth was Librarian to Sir Joseph Banks, and became afterwards the Keeper of the Natural History Collections in the British Museum. By the country people in Wiltshire it is called the “Shepherd's Crown.”

The König's Sea-Urchin belongs to a subdivision of the old Linnean genus Cidaris, to which the name of Cyphosoma was given by Agassiz (from κυϕὸς, curvus; σῶμα, corpus). The five ambulacral bands are nearly as broad as the inter-ambulacral, and are ornamented with a double series of tubercles equal in size to the rest. These tubercles are placed on crenulated bosses, but are not perforated as in most of the Cidaridæ.

The upper and under sides of this fossil Urchin are so different that drawings of them might be taken to represent two distinct species. The under side exhibits ten pairs of rows of tubercles, largest at the margin, and diminishing gradually to the central orifice. On the upper surface the tubercles are much smaller, and there are two additional rows on the inter-ambulacral bands, external to those which are continued downwards over the base.

When “the waters were divided from the waters” and they were called “seas,” the level at which they were allowed to rest, being determined, has ever since remained immutably fixed. With the land, however, it is very different; its elevation above the sea, and consequent outline, has varied from the very moment it “appeared” or in other words arose from beneath the “waters,” and each successive geological era comprised within itself countless changes in this relative distribution of Land and Water, and many marked variations in the climatal agencies effecting the one, and in the tides and currents which sorted the shingle, sands, and finer sediments formed by the other. If proof of the truth of this be required we have but to pause before any bed of conglomerate, in any strata from the lowest to the most recent, and we have there presented to us a clear evidence of a period of local destruction in rocks previously formed and consolidated, and a consequent reproduction out of their disintegrated masses; but should we find in that conglomerate a block of a still older conglomerate, and this, on examination, was found to contain pebbles derived from ancient fossiliferous rocks in which we discover the remains of shells and corals, we clearly see that the process of formation, consolidation, destruction and reproduction has been going on during countless ages before the formation of the conglomerate we first examined.

Mr. Bensted, in his ‘Notes on the Geology of Maidstone’ (p. 336) has referred to certain vegetable remains from the Kentish rag-beds of his quarry, under the title of Dracœna Benstedii; and under this name the specimen stands recorded in Professor Morris's Catalogue. The entry there is “Dracœna (Linn.) Benstedii, König, Mus. Brit., L. G. S., Maidstone,” but the name of the class is not given, whether by omission or from some special reason we are not aware. The recent Dracœnœ are referred by botanists to the Liliaceæ, and the best-known species is that which supplies the fine pigment used by house-grainers, and commonly known as “Dragon's blood.”

The Dragon-trees form a most extraordinary and celebrated genus of monocotyledonous vegetables. They belong to the Asparagus family; and with the appearance and interior organization of the Palms, they are said to approach them still nearer in their fructification.

All the kinds are said to delight in arid soils, and to flourish on the shores by the sea, ranging from that level to eight hundred or a thousand yards on the mountains.

Twenty to twenty-five species are recorded as natural to intertropical regions—India, China, the islands of the Pacific, Cape of Good Hope, and the coast and islands of South Africa. One only exists in the northern part of the American continent, in the far north of Canada, or on the borders of the icy regions of Hudson. Bay.

We are told that Lord Chatham once excused himself for not paying due attention to the speech of a political rival by saying, that he felt that man was responsible to the Creator that his time should not be wasted by hearing discourses which neither conveyed profit or amusement to the hearer, nor honour and dignity to the speaker. We were reminded forcibly of this anecdote by reading in our esteemed contemporary the ‘Parthenon,’ a few weeks ago, a paper entitled “Likes and Similitudes,”—a title very like that of an Adelphi farce.

It has been observed by metaphysical writers, that every object in the world must be either like or unlike some other object, and consequently, there can be no difficulty in instituting either a comparison or a contrast between any two things. For those readers then, who, like the zoologists ridiculed by Forbes, have a vivid perception of analogy, but not of affinity, as well as for that far more numerous class who can but perceive differences, without being able to decide whether they are dependent upon analogy or affinity, the perusal of “Likes and Similitudes” will afford insipid and innutritive mental repast, akin in nature to that which regales poetic minds entranced over the pages of the ‘Sentiment of Flowers’ or ‘The Language of Plants.’

We are not ashamed to confess our ignorance when we meet with anything we do not understand. On the contrary, we regard such confessions as one of the roads to knowledge; and we always wished it to be one of the features of this magazine that matters not understood should be brought before the world in its pages. We set the example ourselves in the most prominent part of our journal—its opening pages.

Few things are so little understood as fossil vegetables, and least of all are fossil fruits.

Some new species from the lower chalk of Rochester have just been added to the national collection in the British Museum, and we lay our drawings of them before our readers with the frank admission that we do not know what they are, and we ask as frankly for information or suggestions.

Some indeed, such as the coffee-like berries, fig-like fruits, and nipadites of the London Clay, carry in themselves the palpable evidence of the classes to which they belong; but there are many specimens from other rocks remaining undescribed in many a collector's cabinet from the want of the ability to give anything like a reasonable suggestion as to what they were, and often, indeed, from the sheer incapacity to assign to them even any probable affinities.

The skull from Muskham, in the valley of the Trent, a side view of which is given in Plate XI., like the animal bones with which it was associated, is stained of a dark-brown colour. The whole of those parts of the cranial bones which bound the cranial cavity are well preserved; but the facial bones, with the exception of a small portion of the nasals, are broken away, so as to expose the whole of the under-surface of the base of the skull.

The considerable development of the frontal sinuses and of the different ridges and processes of the skull, shows it to be that of an adult, and the same characters lead me to believe that it belonged to a male. Otherwise it is small enough for a female, as its extreme length does not exceed 7·2 in., its extreme breadth 5·4 in., and its horizontal circumference 20½ inches.

The skull has a very peculiar form. If a line drawn from the glabella to the superior curved line of the occiput be made horizontal, the highest point of the longitudinal median contour of the skull will be seen to be situated about the middle of the length of the sagittal suture, and from this point the contour shelves rapidly downwards, to the brow on the one hand, and to the centre of the space between the apex of the lambdoidal suture and the occipital protuberance on the other. This last is the most prominent portion of the back part of the skull, the median contour below it bending forwards to the occipital protuberance, which is a very strong, projecting, triangular process.

In these days of progress, when the alleged origin of the human race from a transmuted gorilla is canvassed as a demonstrable and demonstrated theory by many geologists and zoologists, and the pens of various distinguished writers are occupied to prove the absolute identity of man's physiological and psychological nature with that of the beasts of the field, it behoves the candid student of palæontology to inquire what are the fossil members of the Order of Mammalia immediately beneath man—the Quadrumana, and whether they are such individuals as might fulfil the hypothetical condition of being his ancestors, under any of the “derivative” theories propounded by Darwin or Lamarck.

In venturing upon this field of error, doubt, and confusion, I wish dispassionately to endeavour to divest myself of any adherence to any prevailing doctrine. Imbued strongly with the conviction of the unity of type of all animals, and with the probability of their common origin by secondary law, yet I advocate no theory which derives mankind from any known recent or fossil species of animal. Convinced of the distinctive peculiarities of the human brain, characters not satisfactorily demonstrated in any animal, yet I do not shut my eyes to the analogy which sometimes exists between the structures in the lowest men and the highest apes.

The question which heads this article is not a new one. An old one, indeed, it is; and, common as chalk flints and chalk ventriculites are, it does not show much energy on the part of cretaceous—we do not know how else to single them out—geologists and palæontologists, that this old question has never yet been answered.

The only man who has ever worked properly on the subject is Mr. Toulmin Smith, who many years ago laboured hard and well on these curious organisms, and then retired on his laurels. But Mr. Smith, like all men who have devoted themselves to a special subject, is full of prejudices—we do not mean to say errors—and no progress in our knowledge can be hoped to be made until these prejudices are attacked. Mr. Smith, having built his castle, is not likely to strengthen it until its walls have been undermined, or at least have been battered by the artillery of able antagonists. Dr. Bowerbank is considered to be the only powerful opponent of Mr. Smith's views; but whether the Doctor has expressed his opinions in print or only verbally in ordinary conversation, we do not know; at any rate, the world believes the amiable philosopher of Barnsbury Grove to differ in opinion from the ventriculite-anatomist of Highgate Hill. Mr. Smith believes them to be highly-organized polypidoms, which in their living state were covered over with tentaculated polypes, or that at least were studded with hundreds of tentacle-surrounded heads, ever waving their tiny arms, and catching and feeding upon the tiny prey or on fragments of animal substances which came within their clutch. What Dr. Bowerbank believes them to be we need not say is — sponges.

By the side of a cast of the large-fronted ox of Scandinavia, in the case of fossil Bovidæ in the British Museum, is a specimen found in Bawdsey Bog, near Felixstow, in Suffolk, referred to that same species—the only example recorded in England, if exhibition in the cases of our national institution be a record, for it has been nowhere figured or described.

That the determination of the species is correct there can be little doubt, as the specimen was seen and examined by Professor Nilsson on his late visit to this country, and the correctness of the determination was verified by him. It is to this, one of the most interesting but least known species, that we now wish to draw attention. It is interesting because it was probably a species of higher antiquity that lived on to be coæval with the early human races whose relics are found in the deposits of that remarkable border-land between the last geological ages of the Prehuman era and the obliterated first chapters of Human History.

The outcroppings of the Cretaceous strata in the valley of the Medway, the great quarries in the lower beds of the greensand for the much-used Kentish ragstone, the extensive chalk-pits at Burham and other places, the pottery clay-pits and the numerous brickfields, afford excellent facilities for the observation of the geological structure of Maidstone and the surrounding country.

By taking the road from Rochester, through Maidstone, to Linton, the outcrops of the Chalk and its subordinate beds are passed over in succession across their line of strike.

The chalk hills, are covered, at various places, with a red, tenacious (Post-Tertiary or Diluvial) clay, in which great quantities of flint nodules are buried.

Now that the “season” is fast approaching for field-work, a few remarks concerning the geology of the above locality will doubtless be acceptable to many of our readers. Such of them who may have broken ground on it will remember with pleasure its beautiful scenery and the peculiar charms which attract the naturalist to it. That it is interesting in more respects than a merely geological one, is shown by the botanists who wander there in search of rare and beautiful plants, and the antiquarian who finds in its old keep and other more ancient relics subjects for thought. Above all “Moultrassie Hall” and “Peveril Castle” hold an honoured place in our literature enshrined by the genius of Scott. The flora of the locality is particularly interesting, especially that of the lower class. Maidenhair, spleenwort, and rue-leaved spleenwort grow upon almost every wall; and the cystopteris in several species is also common, whilst the adder's-tongue and the little moonwort are exceedingly plentiful in the richer pastures. The number of mosses is exceedingly great. The beautiful Bryum dendroides and others abound in the moister spots of the Cave Dale. In fact, the botanical character of the vegetation hereabout is so peculiar to the three formations which are found as to form a geological map to the underlying rocks, coloured by nature herself! The limestone clothed with its short and beautiful carpet of green; the black shales of the Yoredale rocks covered by their stunted and brown vegetation; and the millstone-grit in the glowing summer-time quite purple with the flowers of the heather.

In the year 1860, when engaged in drawing up a list of the fossils known to occur in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, we had occasion to remark that, with the exception of the Pteraspis, we had found in our northern rocks the various fossils of the equivalent beds in England, and many others besides, indicating an extensive piscine fauna in that epoch of geological history. We have now to remove that exception, for Pteraspis does occur with us. Some very fine specimens have recently been found in our Scottish rocks, and from their examination we are not only able to discern that fragments which have been many years in our possession, and which we could not refer to any known fossil, belong to that palæozoic fish, but we are also encouraged to attempt the restoration of the remarkable buckler, composed of solid bone, in which this ancient denizen of the deep was encased.

Figure 1. In the construction of this diagram three fossil specimens have been employed. These specimens are similar in their proportions and in the method of their preservation, and their exact measurements have been followed in the figure. The first specimen, used for this diagram, exhibits very beautifully the form of the shield with the terminal horns, and the distinct eye-sockets. The eyes are placed on the margin of the shield, and their impression is also seen on a cast in the stone of this specimen. The second specimen is the prolonged central termination of the shield, which has been broken off at the ridge which terminates on either side in the horns. The third specimen show’s the junction of this central prolongation with the shield. All the three specimens have a high central ridge, and still retain something of the graceful outline of the living form. As preserved in the stone these specimens show only the nacreous layer, the other component layers of the bone of the Pteraspis having perished in their case.

It would be an insult to reason to deny the power of the Omnipotent to create at once plants and animals out of inorganic or any kind of matter: on the other hand, it would be equally irrational to doubt His power to ordain and sustain laws, through the instrumentality of which originally created organisms could be modified and adapted to external changes. The two modes may be designated,—the first, Autotheogeny,—and the second, Genetheonomy.

I hold that an organism, whether it typifies a species, a genus, a family, an order, or a class, is an autotheogen, if it possesses a set of characters which isolate it from other equivalent groups; also, that such an organism, through being acted on by inherent and external forces, may become more or less modified, thereby resulting in genetheonomous forms. I see no reason why Mr. Darwin should not admit the same, notwithstanding that his present belief merely recognizes among animals “at most only four or five” autotheogenous roots of apparently as many classes. On psychological grounds alone, Man must be regarded as isolated from all other organisms; hence I consider him to be an autotheogenous species.

So little is known of Scottish Jurassic Brachiopoda, that any additional information cannot fail to prove interesting. Professor Nicol wrote me on the 16th of April, 1860, that out of a pretty large collection of the fossils of this period sent up to the Aberdeen meeting of the British Association, he found only two species and specimens of Brachiopoda, and both imperfect. That in Sunderland they are most common in the Dunrobin Reefs (by some thought to be Oxford clay, by others Lias), but that the stone is so friable, that the specimens fall to pieces almost at the slightest touch; and that in the sandstone at Braambury Hill, are casts of a large shell, like Terebratula perovalis, but often crushed and distorted.

In 1850, the late A. Bobertson, of Elgin, sent me two beautifully preserved Rhynchonellæ (R. lacunosa?), from Dunrobin, and which will be found figured and described in my monograph; and about the same period, the late Hugh Miller sent me a specimen of T. numismalis, from the Lias of Shendwick, and another of Rhynchonella Bouchardii, from the Lias of Cromarty. Mr. Geikie recorded likewise a Rhynchonella tetrahedra, from the Middle Lias of the island of Pabba.

The minds of the British public, accustomed to review the complex phenomena of geology and palæontology in the Old, are apt to neglect the equally interesting evidences afforded to them of past life in the New World. American palæontology is distinguished not because the mighty hemisphere, now the seat of political convulsions, has not passed through analogous phases of life-stages to those presented by the elder continent, nor because the extinct fauna of America is less interesting than that of Europe, Asia, or Australia, nor that the most eminent men in both worlds have omitted to call attention to the stupendous monuments of bygone existence in the pampas of La Plata or on the shores of Patagonia, but because the public mind has not yet sufficiently realized the idea that during the period whilst Europe and Asia underwent the manifold and changing influences of geological time, like conditions were passed through in America.

A tradition exists in the minds of all the earliest aboriginal nations of America, on the banks of the Missouri, at Manta, at Punta St. Elena in Ecuador, at Suacha in New Granada, at Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes, and at Tagua-tagua in the south of Chile, that a vast nation of colossal human beings existed before the present inhabitants. These giants, the credulous and imaginative mind of the native supposed, were destroyed by the deities, like the old race of Titans by the Olympian gods, or the Hrimthursar—the frost-giants of ice and snow—by the supporters of Odin and the Æsir in the Norse mythology.

The genus Cainotherium was founded by Bravard in the year 1835. Since his time it has received the following names:—Cyclognathus, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 1835; Microtherium, Herm. von Meyer, 1837; Oplotherium and Plectognathus, Laizet and De Parieu, 1838; whilst the characteristically synthetic mind of De Blainville reunited it to the genus Anoplotherium, under the title of latecurvatum.

Gervais says it is probable that many species, and not one only, can be recognized amongst the remains which have been discovered, and that this conclusion has been admitted by all palæontologists who have studied these small pachyderms.

In the year 1859, M. Marcou proposed to substitute the word “Dyas” for “Permian,” and summed up his views by saying that he regarded “the New Red Sandstone, comprising the Dyas and Trias, as a great geologic period, equal in time and space to the Palæozoic epoch or the Grey wacke (Silurian and Devonian), the Carboniferous (Mountain-limestone and Coal), the Mesozoic (Jurassic and Cretaceous), the Tertiary (Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene), and the recent deposits (Quaternary and later)”!!

As that author, who had not been in Russia, criticized the labours and inductions of my associates De Verneuil and Von Keyserling, and myself, in having proposed the word “Permian” for tracts in which he surmised that we had commingled with our Permian deposits much red rock of the age of the Trias, I briefly defended the views I had further sustained by personal examination of the rocks of Permian age in various other countries of Europe.

It was, indeed, evident that M. Marcou's proposed union of the so-called Dyas and Trias in one natural group could not for a moment be maintained, since there is no conclusion on which geologists and palæontologists are more agreed, than that the series composed of Roth-liegende, Kupfer-Schiefer, Zechstein, etc., forms the uppermost Palæozoic group, and is entirely distinct in all its fossils, animal and vegetable, from the overlying Trias, which forms the true base of the Mesozoic or Secondary rocks.