. The testimony of the rocks; . l remind us We can make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of that perhaps another. Sailing oer lifes solemn main,A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. Seeing, shall take heart again. With the Stonisfield slates, — a clei^osit which lies abovewhat is known as the Inferior OoHte, — the remains ofmammaliferous animals first apj^ear. As, however, no othermammalian remains occur until after the close of the greatSecondary Division, and as certain marked peculiaritiesattach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to m
. The testimony of the rocks; . l remind us We can make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of that perhaps another. Sailing oer lifes solemn main,A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. Seeing, shall take heart again. With the Stonisfield slates, — a clei^osit which lies abovewhat is known as the Inferior OoHte, — the remains ofmammaliferous animals first apj^ear. As, however, no othermammalian remains occur until after the close of the greatSecondary Division, and as certain marked peculiaritiesattach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to mquirewhether their place, so far in advance of their fellows, maynot be indicative of a radical difference of character, — adifference considerable enough to suggest to the zoologistan improvement in his scheme of classification. It has beenshown by Professor Owen, — our highest authority in com-parative anatomy, — that while one Stonisfield genus une-quivocally belonged to the marsupial order, another of Its Fig. THYLACOTHERIUM PREVOSTI. {Stonisfield Slate.) genera bears also certain of the marsupial traits; and ihatthe group which they composed, — a very small one, andconsisting exclusively of minute insect-eating animals, — ex-hibits in its general aspect the characteristics of this pouchedfamily. Even the genus of the group that least resemblesthem was pronounced by Cuvier to have its nearest aflSnities 118 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL with the opnssums. And let us mark how very much maybe implied in this circumstance. In the ^^ Animal King-dom of the great naturalist just named, the marsupiata,or pouched animals, are made to occupy the fourth placeamong the nine orders of the Mammalia; but should theynot rather occupy a place intermediate between the placen-tal mammals and the birds ? and does not nature indicatetheir true position by the position which she assigns tothem in the geologic scale ? The birds are oviparous; andbetween the extrusion of the egg and th
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