BOOKS.

THE UNDERWORLD..

BYRON, in his grand and lurid inspiration, represents the first murderer, ere the commission of his crime, as conducted by the fallen Archangel, through the air of which he was the prince, past multiplying masses of increasing lights, through a wilder- ness of withering stars, into the " world of phantoms which are beings past and shadows still to come ; " where, as the black-

' ness gathered round him, there was yet a praaternatural light, by which he saw, first, huge dusky masses ; and then seeking "to behold death and dead things," unbarred the gates of darkness, stepped beyond enormous vapours as they opened wider and wider, till at last he found himself in that shadowy Hades, that realm of Death which he so coveted to know. This fine poetio fiction was, the poet tells us, suggested by "the notion of Cuvier that the world had been destroyed several times before the crea- tion of man."

We shall now reverse Byron's procedure ; reconverting the fiction into fact. Guided by the spirit of knowledge, the true Lucifer or light-bearer of humanity, we shall retrograde through the modern epoch, the medifeval period, and dark ages of the world,—it may be for millions of years,—till we arrive at that remote era, where the "very blue of 'Time's' empurpled night fades to a dreary twilight," while the clouds of Ignorance roll away, and we step into the world of beings past, into the geo- logical Hades, the subterranean residence of these humbler Pre- adamites, the extinct animals.

To drop metaphor, we propose not to criticise but report the facts which relate to these interesting tenants of the terrestrial Underworld ; as they are systematized and explained, by one who is "there sitting" where few have the privilege "to soar." Thus elaborated these facts form in part the science "which treats of the evidences in the earth's strata, of organic beings, which mainly consist of petrified or fossil remains ; " the complementary facts being those which respect similar relics of plants ; and the two series of facts, when duly methodized, constituting the science of ancient beings, under the more magniloquent title of Paleon- tology. At present it is only with one constituent of this science that we are concerned ; our text-book being entitled a systematic summary of extinct animals. Organisms, or living things, may be defined, with sufficient accuracy for our present purpose, to be such as possess a peculiar internal structure, capable of "receiving fluid matter from with- out, altering its nature, and adding it to the alterative structure.

When the living thing can move, when it has a mouth to feed with, when it inhales oxygen and exhales carbonic acid, when it develops certain tissues which we omit to specify, it is called an animal. On the other hand, when the organism is rooted, has neither mouth nor stomach, exhales oxygen, and has certain ap- propriate tissues, it is called a plant." Both plants and animals are specialized members of the great natural group of living things. Now, there are beings, mostly of minute size, neither true plants nor true animals, but manifesting the common or- ganic characters. These generalized organisms are called proto- zoa, or, as we would venture to translate the word, primitive animates. To the kingdom of protozoa belong sponges and ex- ceedingly small animalcules. Of fossil sponges, there are no less than thirty-six genera and 427 species. "In England, they specially characterize the chalk formation." The minute animal- cules are found in the formations of the tertiary age. "These organisms," writes Ehrenberg, "constitute a chain, which, though in the individual link it be microscopic, yet in the mass is a mighty one, connecting the life phenomena of distant ages of the earth, and proving that the dawn of organic nature coexistent with us reaches further back in the history of the earth than had hitherto been suspected." At Egen in Bohemia, there is a stratum of two miles in length, and averaging twenty- eight feet in thickness. Of this stratum, the uppermost ten feet are almost entirely composed of the siliceous shells of infusoria. At Bilin, in Bohemia, is a layer of polishing slate, fourteen feet thick, in every cubic inch of which there are forty-one thousand millions of an extinct species of infusoria. On the shores of the Lake Uranea in Sweden, lies a quantity of powdery, matter, formed in great part of siliceous shells, which the poor inhabitants mix up with flour, and use as an article of food. The stone of which Paris is built is composed in great part of the minute and complex shells of foraminifers, belonging to the second class of priitozoa called rhizopods. In fact, these tiny organisms form strata, which in the aggregate become mountain masses.

Passing from the kingdom protozoa to the kingdom animalia, we find that the stony corals are, with one exception, the largest and most important class of invertebrate fossils. The Silurian limestone of Wenlock Edge is itself a coral reef, thirty miles in length ; while, in the fields about Steeple Ashton, every stone turned up by the plough is a coral. In the English eocene strata alone are twenty-five corals all extinct. We leave the stone- lilies, the sea-stars, the sea-urchins, the sea-cucumbers, belong- ing to the fourth class of the province radiate, and entering a new province, exemplified hy the worm, the lobster, the scorpion, and the beetle, we find that 2654 fossil articulata form but a very small proportion of those which have probably existed. Of these

• Pubcontology; or a Systematic Summary of Extinct Animals and their Geo- logical Relations. By Richard Owen, F.R.S.,8re. Published by Adam and Charles Black.

some were air-breathing insects, that danced and hummed in the carboniferous forests of the ancient world, some were, perhaps, marine worms, and some lobsters and hermit-crabs. We may instance one individual member of the "great family of Trilo- bites," a patrician named Asaphus Tyramns, each of whose eyes is computed to have six thousand facets. Advancing into the province mollusca, we encounter first the lampshells (brachiopoda) ; of which seventy-five species only out of 1300 still survive ; bivalves, of which thirty-five genera out of 150 have become extinct ; univalves, with more than 5000 species in a fossil state ; and cephalopods, whose lower group, with their chambered shells, similar to the pearly nautili, contain 1400 ex- tinct species. Remarking here that "every type of invertebrate animal is represented in the superimposed stratified deposits called Cambrian and lower Silurian, we pass on to the fourth province, vertebrate.

"The earliest good evidence which has been obtained of a ver- tebrate animal in the earth's crust is a spine," resembling the dorsal spine of the dogfish, and a buckler like that of cephelaspis, the first discovered by Mr. Murchison, the second by Mr. Banks, and both found in the formation called Upper Ludlow Rock. Of the order of fishes, which includes sharks and rays, testimony is found "in the marine deposits of every formation from the Upper Silurian beds to the present period. But none of the pakeozic fossils are referable to any existing genius." The old red sand- stone contains the winged fish, discovered by Mr. Hugh Miller in 1833. Judging by the portrait of his "dorsal surface" with which Mr. Owen has favoured his readers, we should be inclined to pronounce him a very "odd fish" indeed. Speaking of a little fellow with a strong helm and a naked body, who shot out his armed head and arrested as they passed, the minute animals on which it preyed, our author observes : "The animal world is full of such compensatory defences ; there is a half suit of armour given to shield half the body and a wise instinct to protect the rest." In the consolidation of the old red sandstones of Great Britain, Russia, &c., the carcasses of the fishes entombed in the primeval mud have had their share. The density, tenacity, and durability of the Devonian flagstones of Caithness, are wholly at- tributable to the dead fishes, that rolled in their original consti- tuent mud. Mr. Owen here avails himself of the evidence afforded by the striking facts of superposition, successive stratification, and upheaval of a great portion of the county of Caithness, as well as of that given by the wonderful structures of the extinct Devonian fishes, to rebuke the ingenious but credulous announcer of the law of " prochronism," a gentleman who "prefers to try to make it believed that God had recently and at once called into being all these phenomena ; that the creatures they simulate never actually existed, but were created fossil !" There is another point on which fishes afford valuable testi- mony. As marine deposits they "are exempt from the attack of the uniformitarian on the score of negative evidence, to which at- tack conclusions from the known genetic history of air-breathing animals are open." Thus fishes, with all their oddities, are reasonable enough to side with the progressionists. There is one other deduction, drawn by our author, from a re- trospect of the mutations in the forms of fishes, which we cannot omit. The nntritively inferior species have been superseded by those better fitted to afford mankind a sapid and wholesome food ; the cod, the herring, the salmon, and the turbot, "greatly pre- dominating at the period immediately preceding and accompany- ing the advent of man."

The next section in Mr. Owen's book is entitled " Ichnology, or the Science of the Foot-prints of Animals, or even of Imprints in general." "Impressions made on a part of the earth's surface, soft enough to admit them, may be preserved after the impressing body has perished." Thus, " the hailstone, the ripple wave, the raindrop, even the wind that bore it along and drove it slanting on the sand, have been registered in casts of the cavities which they originally made on the soft sea-beach." Thus, too, sun- cracks and frost-marks, "written on imperishable stone," have been transmitted from a mysterious foretime. In the same way, "every form of animal life that writhing, crawling, walking, running, hopping, or leaping, could leave a track, depression, or foot-print behind it, might thereby leave similar lasting evidence of its existence, and also to some extent of its nature." The first illustration of this doctrine was given by Dr. Duncan, who in 1828, inferred from the impressions left on certain sand-stones in Dumfriesshire, the existence of tortoises at the period of their de- position. This species of Nature-printing enabled Dr. Deane, after he had witnessed the first exposure of the red sand slabs near Greenfield, to record that " on that morning gentle showers watered the earth." On. another morning in that " anld lang syne world," a kind of animal like the kingcrab chronicled his progress over the Potsdam sandstone. Have myriads, have millions of years elapsed since the sunrise of that day F " The imagination," says our guide into this underworld, "is bailed in the attempt to realize the extent of time past when the creatures were in being that moved upon the sandy shores of that most ancient Silurian sea." That was the epoch of the saurian reptiles of nothosaurus, plesiosaurus, pistosaurus, simosanrus, and ichthyosaurus. Ichthyosaurus, or the great fish-lizard, and to, crawl on the strand and bask in the sunshine, where the Has and oolite now lie, or in the obscurity of night and the depths of the sea, descry its prey at great or little distances, with an enormous eye that acted, says Dr. Backhand, like an optical instrument of varied and prodigious power. More than thirty species of ichthyosaurns are known : of course, all are extinct. Labyrin- thodon, too, lies embedded in red sandstone ; and pterodaotyle, or ivingfinger, who used to be a sort of flying surprise, is buried, poor reptile, in the chalk of Kent and upper greensand of Cam- bridgeshire, to instance two out of many places of sepulchre, both at home and abroad.

Passing from the reptilia, we come to the birds, a very old family, as their spokesman in the fanciful play of Aristophanes, takes care to let us know. Not quite as old as chaos, but almost as old as that chaos-maker, Love. Nay, Love was himself a sort of bird. However, this be, our feathered friends may well plume themselves on their long descent. Dr. Deane first noticed impres- sions resembling birds' feet, in some slabs of sandstone, from Con- necticut River, in 1835. The tracks are found scattered over an area GI eighty miles. They are repeated in a succession of beds, at some points more than 1000 feet thick, which may have been thousands of years in forming. They appear to be the tracks of a giant bird, whom Principal Hitchcock proposes to call bronto- zoum, a gregarious character, who seems to have had it all his own way, feathering his nest at will, in those good old days, in that strange American valley.

Passing on to the class mammalia, we find it impossible to do justice to beasts of their inches. Dining the deposition of the lower Purbeck bed, mammals, we are told, cooperated with lizards in restraining the undue increase of insect life. Balienodon, a cetaceons animal, is converted in part, at least, into phosphate of lime, deposited in the red crag of Essex and Suffolk. Since Pro- fessor Henslow first indicated its value, the red crag has yielded annually many thousand pounds of superphosphates to the agri- culturist, "a striking instance of the profitable results of a seem- ingly most unpromising discovery in pure science." But we must leave balwnodon and zeuglodou ; we must leave dinotherium, "who diminished the interval between the lophiodon and the elephant" ; acerotherium, who "was a link connecting palseo- therium with rhinoceros" ; hippotherium, who linked on paloplo- therium with equus ; we must leave these and all their carnivo- rous and herbivorous geological relations, successors predecessors, and contemporaries ; subjoining only that "the further we pene- trate into time for the recovery of extinct mammalia, the further we must go into space to find their existing analogues." We come now to Professor Owen's more general and philosophi- cal conclusions. On the problem of the extinction of species, the Professor is of opinion that little can be said demonstratively ; while neither experiment nor observation elucidates the still" more mysterious subject" of their origin. The probable causes of ex- tirpation appear to have been either "continuous slowly- operating geological changes," or "no greater sudden change than the, so to speak, spectral appearance of mankind on a limited tract of land not before inhabited." On this hypothesis (ex- cluding human action), "extinction implies the want of self- adjusting power in the individuals of the species subjected thereto." To the operation of changes in physical geography, affecting the conditions of existence, is to be attributed the dis- appearance of the Siberian manatee, elephant, and rhinoceros.

In the case, however, of two extinct qucri whose names we forbear to mention, our author is disposed to 'admit that the process of extermination, inaugurated by general causes, may have been completed by a rude primitive human race.

The evidence for the existence of such a race is afforded by the exhumation of "flint weapons called unquestionably fashioned by human hands, discovered in stratified gravel in the valley of the Somme from seventeeen to twenty feet below the surface." The antiquity of these flint instruments, Sir Charles Lyell believes, to be great indeed, if compared to the times of his- tory or tradition ; the disappearance of various quadrupeds, now foreign to Europe, implying "a vast lapse of ages separating the era in which the fossil implements were framed, and that of the invasion of Gaul by the Romans."

Briefly noticing the development hypothesis of Buffon, Lamarck, the author of The Vestiges, Mr. Wallace, and Mr. Darwin, the Professor, while recognizing the more generalized structures "of extinct, as compared with the more specialized forms" of recent animals, declines to accept them on the ground "that observation of the effects of any of the above hypothetical transmuting in- fluences in changing any known species into another has not yet been recorded."

From the law of irrelative or vegetative repetition, from the law of unity of plan, from the phenomena of parthenogenesis and progressive departure from general type, the author infers the ex- istence "of a continuously operative secondary creational law." Of the action of this, as yet, "ill-comprehended law," one result, in regard to animal life and its assigned work on this planet, is, that there has plainly been "an ascent and progress in the main." "Turning from a retrospect into past time for the pros- pect of time to come," Mr. Owen pronounces that the science of ancient beings is destitute of all prophetic insight, when we "speculate on the future course and ultimate fate of vital pheno- mena in this planet." Is there to be a general conflagration ? Is there to be a " milennial exaltation of the world to a paradisia- cal state ?" Is regenerated earth to be "the abode of a higher race of intelligences ?" To these questions he replies : the guide post of paleontology points but a very short way in the di- rection of the more attractive speculation, and

"in leaving it we find ourselves in a wilderness of conjecture where to try to ad- vance is 'but to be' in wandering mazes lost."

One object, however, which our philosopher has had in view, be

regards, with satisfaction, as fulfilled. That object was to exhibit the beneficence and intelligence of the Creative Power. The con- trasted limbs, hoofs, paws, fins, and wings, which he has des- cribed, differ only, he maintains, in their obvious superiority from the mechanical instruments which we ourselves plan with fore- sight and calculation for purposes analogous "to those which they subserve." In vindicating the Law of Correlations or Principle of the coincidences of animal structures, he asserts or im- plies its teleological character, against Geoffrey St. Hilaire and others. St. Hilaire, it seems, refused to see the existence of a design in the construction of any part of an organized body. Comte, and we believe Humboldt, were also antiteleogists. The Design argument, with all its recommendations, has not yet been so expounded, as to be entirely free from objection. If any really philosophical savant could indicate its appropriate area and give it its due circumscription; if he could present it in an unexcep- tionable form, purified of its grosser anthropomorphisms and re- lieved of its dangerous logical duality, a future professor, might perhaps comment on the law of correlations without finding it necessary to impute to those who are unable to admit "the in- structive impression of Design," a defect of mind, allied or ana- logous to colour blindness, or to waive them aside, with the self- congratulatory intimation, that "such intellects are not the higher and more normal examples," but have ever been a "small and unfruitful minority." At any rate such a restatement of the lofty argument as would assay to meet the objections of some abnormal minds fallen, it may be, on evil days, and aim to revive in them a quiet faith, a loving submission and humble joy, would be a "work of noble note" worthy of the highest and most normal intellect.