| ↑ 2 blocks not present in 1860 1861 1866 1869 1872; present in 1859 |
| The most striking case, however, is that of the Whale family; as these animals have huge bones, are marine, and range over the world, the fact of not a single bone of a whale having been discovered in any secondary formation, seemed fully to justify the belief that this great and distinct order had been suddenly produced in the interval between the latest secondary and earliest tertiary formation.
But now we may read in the Supplement to Lyell's 'Manual,' published in 1858, clear evidence of the existence of whales in the upper greensand, some time before the close of the secondary period.
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that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper
and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archeopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solenhofen. Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than
how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world. ↑
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| I may give another instance,
from having passed under my own
has much struck me. In a memoir on Fossil Sessile Cirripedes, I
stated that, from the
of existing and extinct tertiary species; from the extraordinary abundance of the individuals of many species all over the world, from the Arctic regions to the equator, inhabiting various zones of depths from the upper tidal limits to 50 fathoms; from the perfect manner in which specimens are
in the oldest tertiary beds; from the ease with which even a fragment of a valve can be recognised; from all these circumstances, I inferred
had sessile cirripedes existed during the secondary periods, they would certainly have been preserved and discovered; and as not one species had
discovered in beds of this age, I concluded that this great group had been suddenly developed at the commencement of the tertiary series. This was a sore trouble to me, adding as I
one more instance of the abrupt appearance of a great group of species. But my work had hardly been published, when a skilful palæontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect specimen of an unmistakeable sessile cirripede, which he had himself extracted from the chalk of Belgium. And, as if to make the case as striking as possible, this
cirripede was a Chthamalus, a very common, large, and ubiquitous genus, of which not one
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