The

less than just its four hundred and ten spherical lenses. Cephalopoda, indeed, may have held with him a divided empire; but the Brachiopoda, the Pteropoda, the Gasteropoda, and the Acephala, must have been unresisting subjects, and all must have been implicit deference among the Crinoidea, the Pennularia, the Corals, and the Sponges. As we sink lower and lower, the mine of organic existence waxes unproductive and poor: : a few shells now and then appear, a few graptolites, a few sponges. Anon we reach the outer limits of life: a void and formless desert stretches beyond, and dark night comes down upon the landscape.*

*Of course, in all cases in which the evidence is negative, the decision must be given under protest, as not in its nature irreversible, but dependent on whatever positive evidence the course of discovery may yet serve to evolve. In February last (1846), when this chapter was written, no trace of reptiles had been found earlier than the Lower New Red Sandstone, the Permian system of Mr Murchison. I find, however, from a report of the proceedings of the meeting of the British Association, held last September at Southampton, that Mr Lyell having examined certain footprints, the discovery of Dr King of the United States, which occur in Pennsylvania in the middle of the Coal Measures, has determined them to be those of a large reptilion. It does seem strange enough that the prints of this eldest of reptiles should be found so far in advance of what has been long deemed the vanguard of its order,-the thecodent Saurians of the Permian,--and this, too, in a system so carefully explored as the Coal Measures; and yet the occurrence is not without a parallel in the geologic scheme. The mammal of the Stonesfield Slate stands as much alone, and still farther in advance of its fellows. I do not find that I have anything to alter in my statement regarding the introduction of the fish. In Professor Silliman's American Journal for January 1846 it is stated, that an ichthyodorulite had been just discovered in the Onondaga Limestone of New York, and an imperfectly-preserved fish-bone in the Oriskany Sandstone of the same State. There seems, however, to be no reason to conclude from their contemporary organisms,-chiefly shells and corals, which closely approximate to those of the Wenlock Limestone,—that either of them belonged to a more ancient fish than the ichthyodorulite described by Mr Sedgwick, to which I have already had occasion to refer. It seems not unworthy of remark, that while among the fish of the Old Red Sandstone considerably more than three-fourths of the species, and greatly more than nineteen-twentieths of the individuals, are of the Ganoid order, all the fish of the Silurian system yet discovered are Placoids.

CHAPTER XIII.

Birmingham; incessant clamour of the place.-Toy-shop of Britain; serious Character of the Games in which its Toys are chiefly employed. ---Museum.-Liberality of the Sientific English.-Musical Genius of Birmingham.-Theory.-Controversy with the Yorkers.-Anecdote.The English Language spoken very variously by the English; in most cases spoken very ill.—English Type of Person.-Attend a Puseyite Chapel.-Puseyism a feeble Imitation of Popery.-Popish Cathedral.— Popery the true Resting-place of the Puseyite.-Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Puseyite Principle; its purposed Object not attained; Hostility to Science.-English Funerals.

THE sun had set ere I entered Birmingham through a long low suburb, in which all the houses seemed to have been built dur

ing the last twenty years. Particularly tame-looking houses they are; and I had begun to lower my expectations to the level of a flat, mediocre, three-mile city of brick,-a sort of manufactory in general, with offices attached,-when the coach drove up through New Street, and I caught a glimpse of the Town Hall, a noble building of Anglesea marble, of which Athens in its best days might not have been ashamed. The whole street is a fine one. I saw the lamps lighting up under a stately new edifice,-the Grammar School of King Edward VI., which, like most recent erections of any pretension, either in England or among ourselves, bears the mediæval stamp: still farther on I could descry, through the dark

ening twilight, a Roman-looking building that rises over the market-place; and so I inferred that the humble brick of Birmingham, singularly abundant, doubtless, and widely spread, represents merely the business necessities of the place; and that, when on any occasion its taste comes to be displayed, it proves to be a not worse taste than that shown by its neighbours. What first struck my ear as peculiar among the noises of a large town, and their amount here is singularly great,-was what seemed to be somewhat irregular platoon-firing, carried on, volley after volley, with the most persistent deliberation. The sounds came, I was told, from the "proofing-house," an iron-lined building, in which the gun-smith tests his musket-barrels, by giving them a quadruple charge of powder and ball, and then, after ranging them in a row, firing them from outside the apartment by means of a train. Birmingham produces on the average a musket per minute, night and day, throughout the year: it, besides, furnishes the army with its swords, the navy with its cutlasses and pistols, and the busy writers of the day with their steel pens by the hundredweight and the ton; and thus it labours to deserve its name of the "Great Toy-shop of Britain," by fashioning toys in abundance for the two most serious games of the day,—the game of war and the game of opinion-making.

On the morrow I visited several points of interest connected with the place and its vicinity. I found at the New Cemetery, on the north-western side of the town, where a party of Irish labourers were engaged in cutting deep into the hill-side, a good section, for about forty feet, of the Lower New Red Sandstone; but its only organisms,-carbonised leaves and stems, by much too obscure for recognition,-told no distinct story; and so incoherent is the inclosing sandstone matrix, that the labourers dug into it with their mattocks as if it were

a bank of clay. I glanced over the Geological Museum attached to the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, and found it, though small, beautifully kept and scientifically arranged. It has its few specimens of New Red Sandstone fossils, chiefly Posidonomya, from the upper sandstone band which overlies the saliferous marls; but their presence in a middle place here between the numerous fossils of the Carboniferous and Oolitic systems, serves but to show the great poverty in organic remains of the intermediate system, as developed in England. Though of course wholly a stranger, I found free admission to both the Dudley and Birmingham Museums, and, with but few exceptions, experienced a similar liberality in my visits to all the other local collections of England which fell in my way. We have still great room for improvement in this respect in Scotland. We are far behind at least the laymen of England, its liberal mechanicians and manufacturers, and its cultivators of science and the arts,-in the generosity with which they throw open their collections; and resemble rather that portion of the English clergy who make good livings better by exhibiting their consecrated places,-not too holy, it would seem, to be converted into show-boxes,-for paltry twopences and groats. I know not a Museum in Edinburgh or Glasgow, save that of the Highland Society, to which a stranger can get access at once so readily and so free as that which I obtained, in the course of my tour, to the Newcastle, Dudley, Birmingham, and British Museums.

Almost all the larger towns of England manifest some one leading taste or other. Some are peculiarly literary, some decidedly scientific; and the taste paramount in Birmingham seems to be a taste for music. In no town in the world are the mechanical arts more noisy: hammer rings incessantly on anvil; there is an unending clang of metal, an unceasing clank

of engines; flame rustles, water hisses, steam roars, and from time to time, hoarse and hollow over all, rises the thunder of the proofing-house. The people live in an atmosphere continually vibrating with clamour; and it would seem as if their amusements had caught the general tone, and become noisy like their avocations. The man who for years has slept soundly night after night in the neighbourhood of a foundry, awakens disturbed, if by some accident the hammering ceases: the imprisoned linnet or thrush is excited to emulation by even the screeching of a knife-grinder's wheel, or the din of a coppersmith's shop, and pours out his soul in music.

It seems

not very improbable that the two principles on which these phenomena hinge,-principles as diverse as the phenomena themselves, may have been influential in inducing the peculiar characteristic of Birmingham; that the noises of the place, grown a part of customary existence to its people,―inwrought, as it were, into the very staple of their lives,-exerts over them some such unmarked influence as that exerted on the sleeper by the foundry; and that, when they relax from their labours, they seek to fill up the void by modulated noises, first caught up, like the song of the bird beside the cutler's wheel or coppersmith's shop, in unconscious rivalry of the clang of their hammers and engines. Be the truth of the theory what it may, there can be little doubt regarding the fact on which it hinges. No town of its size in the empire spends more time and money in concerts and musical festivals than Birmingham; no small proportion of its people are amateur performers; almost all are musical critics; and the organ in its great Hall, the property of the town, is, with the exception of that of York, the largest in the empire, and the finest, it is said, without any exception. But on this last point there hangs a keen controversy.