The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

II.—Bridging Life's Gaps

"The Old Red Sandstone," says a Scottish geologist in a digest of some recent geological discoveries, "has hitherto been considered as remarkably barren of fossils." Only a few years have gone by since men of no low standing in the science disputed the very existence of this formation—or system, rather, for it contains at least three distinct formations. There are some of our British geologists who still regard it as a sort of debatable tract, entitled to no independent status, a sort of common which should be divided.

It will be found, however, that this hitherto neglected system yields in importance to none of the others, whether we take into account its amazing depth, the great extent to which it is developed both at home and abroad, the interesting links which it furnishes in the geological scale, or the vast period of time which it represents. There are localities in which the depth of the Old Red Sandstone fully equals the elevation of Mount Etna over the level of the sea, and in which it contains three distinct groups of organic remains, the one rising in beautiful progression over the other.

My first statement regarding the system must be much the reverse of the one just quoted, for the fossils are remarkably numerous and in a state of high preservation. I have a hundred solid proofs by which to establish the truth of the assertion within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; and certainly a stranger assemblage of forms has rarely been grouped together—creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth, which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even to their class; boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder; fish, plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned; the tail in every instance among the less equivocal shapes formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebræ to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature than are the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.

Lamarck, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior orders of being towards the superior, and that the offspring of creatures low in the scale may belong to a different and nobler species a few thousand years hence. Never was there a fancy so wild and extravagant. The principle of adaptation still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog. It is true that it is a law of nature that the chain of being is in some degree a continuous chain, and the various classes of existence shade into each other. All the animal families have their connecting links. Geology abounds with creatures of the intermediate class.