to which it is attached, just as the handle of a shovel, stuck half a foot into the earth, at the part where the hand grasps it, would elevate the blade over the surface, or as the stem of a tulip elevates.the flower over the soil. A community of Lingulæ must resemble, in their deep-sea haunts, a group of Lilliputian shovels, reversed by the laborers to indicate their work completed, or a bed of half-folded tulips, raised on stiff, dingy stems, and exhibiting flattened petals of delicate green. I am not aware that any trace of the cartilaginous foot-stalk has been yet detected in fossil Lingulæ ;-like those of this quarry, they are mere shovel-blades divested of the handles: but in all that survives of them, or could be expected to survive, — the calcareous portion, - they are identical in type with the living mollusc of the Moluccas. What most strikes in the globeshaped terebratula, their contemporary, is the singularly antique character of the ventral margin: it seems moulded in the extreme of an ancient fashion, long since gone out. Instead of running continuously round in one plane, like the margins of our existing cockle, venus, or mactra, so as to form, when the valves are shut, a rectilinear line of division, it presents in the centre a huge dovetail, so that the lower valve exhibits in its middle front a square gateway, which we see occupied, when the mouth is closed, by a portcullis-like projection, dependent from the margin of the upper valve. Margins of this antique form characterize some of the terebratulæ of even the Chalk, and the spirifers of the Carboniferous Limestone; but in none of the comparatively modern shells is the square portcullis-shaped indentation so strongly indicated as in the Terebratula Wilsoni. I picked up several other fossils in the quarry: the Orthis orbicularis and Orthis lunata; the Atrypa affinis; several ill-preserved portions of orthoceratite, belonging chiefly, so far as their state of keeping enabled me to decide, to the Orthoceras bullatum; a small, imperfectlyconical coral, that more resembled the Stromatopora concentrica of the Wenlock rocks, than any of the other Silurian corals figured by Murchison; and a few minute sprigs of the Favosites polymorpha. The concretionary character of the limestone of the deposit has militated against the preservation of the larger organisms which it encloses. Of the smaller shells, many are in a beautiful state of keeping: like some of the comparatively modern shells of the Oolite, they still retain unaltered the silvery lustre of the nacre, and present outlines as sharp and well defined, with every delicate angle unworn, and every minute stria undefaced, as if inhabited but yesterday by the living molluscs; whereas most of the bulkier fossils, from the broken and detached nature of the rock, a nodular limestone embedded in strata of shale, exist as mere fragments. What perhaps first strikes the eye is the deep-sea character of the deposit, and its general resemblance to the Mountain Limestone. Nature, though she dropped between the times of the Silurian and Carboniferous oceans many of her genera, and, with but a few marked exceptions, all her species,* seems to have scarce at all altered the general types after which the productions of both oceans were moulded. I could find in this quarry of the Aymestry Limestone no trace of aught higher than the Cephalopoda,— none of those plates, scales, spines, or teeth, indicative of the vertebrate animals, which so abound in the Lower Old Red Sandstones of Scotland. And yet the vertebrata seem to have existed at the * Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described as belonging to the earliest or Protozoic and Silurian period; and of these, only about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series; while but fifteen are common to the whole Paleozoic period, and not one extends beyond it." (Ansted, 1844.) time. The famous bone-bed of the Upper Silurian system, with its well-marked ichthyolitic remains, occurs in the Upper Ludlow Rock, the deposit immediately over head. We find it shelved high, if I may so speak, in the first story of the system, reckoning from the roof downwards; the calcareous deposit in which this hill-side quarry has been hollowed forms a second story; the Lower Ludlow Rock a third; and in yet a fourth, the Wenlock Limestone: just one remove over the Lower Silurians, — for the Wenlock Shale constitutes the base story of the upper division, there have been found the remains of a fish, or rather minute portions of the remains of a fish, the most ancient yet known to the geologist. "Take the Lower Silurians all over the globe," says Sir Roderick Murchison, in a note to the writer of these chapters, which bears date no further back than last July, "and they have never yet offered the trace of a fish." It is to be regretted that the ichthyolite of the Wenlock Limestone the first-born of the vertebrata whose birth and death seem entered in the geologic register has not been made the subject of a careful memoir, illustrated by a good engraving. One is naturally desirous to know all that can be known regarding the first entrance in the drama of existence of a new class in creation, and to have the place and date which the entry bears in the record fairly established. The evidence, however, though not yet made patent to the geological brotherhood, seems to be solid. It has at least satisfied a writer in the Edinburgh Review of last year, generally recognized as one of the master-geologists of the age. “We have seen,” says Mr. Sedgwick, the understood author of the article, "characteristic portions of a fish derived from the shales alternating with the Wenlock Limestone. This ichthyolite, to speak in the technical language of Agassiz, undoubtedly belongs to the Cestraciont family, of the Placoid order, proving to demonstration that the oldest known fossil fish belongs to the highest type of that division of the vertebrata.' A strange debut this, and of deep interest to the student of nature. The veil of mystery must forever rest over the act of creation; but it is something to know of its order, to know that, as exhibited in the great geologic register, graven, like the decalogue of old, on tables of stone, there is an analogy maintained, that indicates identity of style with the order specified in the Mosaic record as that observed by the Creator in producing the scene of things to which we ourselves belong. In both records, the sculptured and the written, - periods of creative energy are indicated as alternating with periods of rest,—days in which the Creator labored, with nights in which He ceased from his labors, again to resume them in the morning. According to both records, higher and lower exist ences were called into being successively, not simultaneously; according to both, after each interval of repose, the succeeding period of activity witnessed loftier and yet loftier efforts of production; — according to both, though in the earlier stages there was incompleteness in the scale of existence, there was yet no imperfection in the individual existences of which the scale was composed; at the termination of the first, as of the last day of creation, all in its kind was good. Ere any of the higher natures existed, "God saw that all was good, When even and morn recorded the third day.” I quitted the quarry in the hill-side, and walked on through the village of Sedgley, towards a second and much more striking hill, well known to geologists and lovers of the picturesque as the "Wren's Nest." A third hill, that of Dudley, beautifully wooded and capped by its fine old castle, lies direct in the same line so that the three hills taken together form a chain of eminences, which run diagonally, for some four or five miles, into the middle of the coal-basin; and which, rising high from the surrounding level, resemble steep-sided islets in an Alpine lake. It is a somewhat curious circumstance, that while the enclosing shores of the basin are formed of the Lower New Red Sandstone, and the basin itself of the Upper and Lower Coal Measures, these three islets are all Silurian; the first,-that of Sedgley, which I had just quitted, presenting in succession the Upper Ludlow Rock and Aymestry Limestone, with some of the inferior deposits on which these rest; and the second and third the Wenlock Shale and Wenlock Limestone. The "Wren's Nest," as I approached it this day along green lanes. and over quiet fields, fringed with trees, presented the appearance of some bold sea-promontory, crowned atop with stunted wood, and flanked by a tall, pale-gray precipice, continuous as a rampart for a full half-mile. But, to borrow from one of Byron's descriptions, "There is no sea to lave its base, But a most living landscape, and the wave Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men Such is the profile of the hill on both sides. Seen in front, it presents the appearance of a truncated dome; while atop we find it occupied by an elliptical, crater-like hollow, that has been grooved deep, by the hand of Nature, along the flat summit, so as to form a huge nest, into which the gigantic roc of eastern story might drop a hundred such eggs as the one familiar to the students of the great voyager Sinbad. And hence the name of the eminence. John Bull, making merry, in one of his humorous moods, with its imposing greatness, |