. The testimony of the rocks; . tableorganisms, in a few ill-preserved fucoids. So far as is yetknown, plants and animals appear together. The long u^-ward march of the animal kingdom takes its departure atits starting point from a thick forest of algae. In Bohemia,in Xorway, in Sweden, in the British Islands, in NorthAmerica, wherever, in fine, what appears to be the lowest, orat least one of the lowest, zones of life has yet been detected,the rocks are found to be darkened by the remains of algae,so abundantly developed in some cases, that they compose,as in the ancient Lower Silurians of Du
. The testimony of the rocks; . tableorganisms, in a few ill-preserved fucoids. So far as is yetknown, plants and animals appear together. The long u^-ward march of the animal kingdom takes its departure atits starting point from a thick forest of algae. In Bohemia,in Xorway, in Sweden, in the British Islands, in NorthAmerica, wherever, in fine, what appears to be the lowest, orat least one of the lowest, zones of life has yet been detected,the rocks are found to be darkened by the remains of algae,so abundantly developed in some cases, that they compose,as in the ancient Lower Silurians of Dumfriesshire, impurebeds of anthracite several feet in thickness. Apparently,fi-om the original looseness of their texture, the individualplants are but indiiferently preserved; nor can we expectthat organisms so ancient should exhibit any veri/ closeresemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocksand skerries of our coasts at the present time. We dodetect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least Fig. PALiEOCHORDA MIXOR. (One half nat. size.) a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modem algae-ologist. The cord-like plant. Chorda jilum^ known to our5 60 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL children as dead mens ropes, from its proving fatal attimes to the too adventurous swimmer who gets entangledin its thick wreaths, had a Lower Silurian representative,known to the Palaeontologist as the Paloeochorda^ or an-cient chorda, which existed a]3parently in two species, — alarger and smaller. The still better known Chondrus cris-pus, the Irish moss or carrageen of our cookery-books, haslikewise its apparent though more distant representative inChondritis^ a Lower Silurian algae, of which there seems toexist at least three species. The fucoids, or kelp weeds,appear to have had also their representatives in .such plantsas Fucoides gracilis of the Lower Silurians of the Malverns;in short, the Thallogens of the first ages of vegetable lifeseem to have resembled, in
Size: 2213px × 1129px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, bookpublish, booksubjectcreation
