| → I believe we are continually taking a most 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| I believe we often take an 1869 |
| We probably take a quite 1872 |
|
| → tacitly admit to ourselves 1859 1860 1861 1866 1869 |
| assume 1872 |
|
| → rain-water. 1859 1860 |
| rain-water charged with carbonic acid. 1861 1866 1869 1872 |
|
| → I suspect that but few 1859 1860 |
| Some 1861 1866 1869 1872 |
|
| → animals 1859 1860 |
| kinds of animals 1861 1866 1869 1872 |
|
| → are 1859 1860 |
| seem to be rarely 1861 1866 1869 1872 |
|
| ↑ 1 blocks not present in 1859 1860 1861 1866; present in 1869 1872 |
| Lastly, many great deposits requiring a vast length of time for their accumulation, are entirely destitute of organic remains, without our being able to assign any reason: one of the most striking instances is that of the Flysch formation, which consists of shale and sandstone, several thousand, occasionally even six thousand feet, in thickness, and extending for at least 300 miles from Vienna to Switzerland; and although this great mass has been most carefully searched, no fossils, except a few vegetable remains, have been found.
|
|
| → from fossil remains 1859 1860 1861 1866 1869 |
| OMIT 1872 |
|
|
sufficient care, as the important discoveries made every year in Europe prove. No organism wholly soft can be preserved. Shells and bones
decay and disappear when left on the bottom of the sea, where sediment is not
→I believe we are continually taking a most
erroneous view, when we
→tacitly admit to ourselves
that sediment is being deposited over nearly the whole bed of the sea, at a rate sufficiently quick to embed and preserve fossil remains. Throughout an enormously large proportion of the ocean, the bright blue tint of the water bespeaks its purity. The many cases on record of a formation conformably covered, after an
interval of time, by another and later formation, without the underlying bed having suffered in the interval any wear and
seem explicable only on the view of the bottom of the sea not rarely lying for ages in an unaltered condition. The remains which do become embedded, if in sand or gravel,
when the beds are
generally be dissolved by the percolation of
→rain-water.
→I suspect that but few
of the
many
→animals
which live on the beach between high and low
→are
preserved. For instance, the several species of the Chthamalinæ (a
of sessile cirripedes) coat the rocks all over the world in infinite numbers: they are all strictly littoral, with the exception of a single Mediterranean species, which inhabits deep
and
been found fossil in Sicily, whereas not one other species has hitherto been found in any tertiary
yet it is
known that the genus Chthamalus existed during the
period. The molluscan genus Chiton offers a partially analogous case. ↑
|
|
| With respect to the terrestrial productions which lived during the Secondary and Palæozoic periods, it is superfluous to state that our evidence
→from fossil remains
|
