FISHES OF THE SILURIAN ROCKS, UPPER AND LOWER.—THEIR RECENT HISTORY, ORDER, AND SIZE

Summary

But the system of the Old Red Sandstone represents the second, not the first, great period of the world's history. There was a preceding period at least equally extended, perhaps greatly more so, represented by the Upper and Lower Silurian formations. And what is the testimony of this morning period of organic existence, in which, so far as can yet be shown, vitality, in the planet which man inhabits, and of whose history or productions he knows anything, was first associated with matter? May not the development hypothesis find a standing in the system representative of this earliest age of creation, which it fails to find in the system of the Old Red Sandstone?

It has been confidently asserted, not merely that it may, but that it does. Ever since the publication, in 1839, of Sir Roderick Murchison's great work on the Silurian System, it had been known that the remains of fishes occur in a bed of the “Ludlow Rock,”—one of the most modern deposits of the Upper Silurian division; and subsequent discoveries, both in England and America, had shown that even the base of this division has its ichthyic organisms. But for year after year, the lower half of the system,—a division more than three thousand feet in thickness,—had failed, though there were hands and eyes busy among its deposits, to yield any vertebrate remains.