THE 
 
 PUZZLE OF LIFE 
 
 .BY 
 
 j<LR TH UR N7CO L>$
 
 THE 
 
 PUZZLE OF LIFE.
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 SfWTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 AND PARLIAMENT STREET
 
 THE PUZZLE OF LIFE; 
 
 AND 
 
 HOW IT HAS BEEN PUT TOGETHER. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FORMATION OF THE EARTH, 
 
 WITH ITS VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE, 
 
 FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, 
 
 INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF 
 
 PRE-HISTORIC MAN, his WEAPONS, TOOLS, and WORKS. 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR NICOLS, F.R.G.S. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS by FREDERICK WADDY. 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 1877. 
 
 All rights reserved.
 
 TO 
 MY YOUNG FRIENDS 
 
 BEATRIX, GUY, SYLVIA, MAY, AND GERALD. 
 
 THE CHILDREN OF 
 
 GEORGE DU MAURI ER. 
 
 20P1148
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 THE favourable reception accorded to the 
 first edition has induced me to give the pre- 
 sent a more definite educational character. 
 Foot-notes are appended, referring to the 
 position in the British Museum of all the 
 principal antiquities, fossils, and implements 
 mentioned in the text ; so that the specimens 
 can easily be found by any young student 
 who wishes, with the book in his hand, to 
 make himself familiar with these -records of 
 past time. This will probably facilitate the 
 search for and recognition of specimens by 
 the reader.
 
 x PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 The additions to the text consist chiefly 
 of a more extended account of the deposi- 
 tion of chalk and other deep-sea formations, 
 founded on the results of the " Challenger " 
 and " Tuscarora " expeditions, and a sketch of 
 the earth-works of the Ohio mound-builders 
 and the stone monuments of Easter Island. 
 Examples of pre-historic art and lake-dwel- 
 lings have been added to the illustrations. 
 
 A. N. 
 
 HAMPSTEAD: March 1877.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 HAVING found that children could be inte- 
 rested in the history of life upon the Earth, and 
 that it appealed forcibly to their understand- 
 ing, I considered that a little book upon the 
 subject might give them the taste for more 
 extended study in after years. The difficulty 
 of treating the, to them, novel conclusions of 
 geology, often founded on abstract reason- 
 ing, in language simple in form yet stating 
 clearly the great principles upon which this 
 reasoning rests, will probably be apparent on 
 every page. Breadth, rather than minuteness, 
 has been aimed at, in the belief that a general
 
 PREFACE TO 
 
 view, not overcrowded with details, is likely 
 to be the most impressive. Thus, in the 
 geological part the leading features of the suc- 
 cession of strata have been preserved, but 
 no details of systematic classification entered 
 into. Similarly, Primeval Man is considered 
 mainly with reference to gradual progress 
 from a rude to a more civilized condition. 
 To have been more explicit, where there is 
 still much difference of opinion, would have 
 obscured the main facts of the evidence for 
 man's great antiquity. 
 
 The illustrations are typical examples of 
 the three arbitrary but convenient divisions of 
 the history of life the vegetable, the animal, 
 and the human such as will be most readily 
 met with in museums. Slight as this sketch 
 is, the liking for it shown by some intelli- 
 gent children, who saw it in manuscript, en- 
 couraged me to believe that there are many 
 others to whom it might prove interesting. 
 
 Some acquaintance with the leading facts 
 in science is daily becoming more necessary
 
 THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 to those who aspire to liberal culture, and in- 
 struction in them is a recognised feature in 
 the curriculum of some public and leading 
 private schools. Thus, it is hoped that the 
 present volume may to some extent serve as a 
 text-book without the severity of such a form. 
 The best English and foreign authorities have 
 been consulted, and other trustworthy sources 
 as papers read before scientific societies 
 drawn upon, bringing the information down to 
 the latest time. Though these pages are de- 
 signed for young persons, other readers, per- 
 haps, who are not familiar with the subject, 
 may find some interest in them if they are 
 not deterred by the necessarily simple style. 
 
 My thanks are due to Mr. H. B. WOOD- 
 WARD, of the Geological Survey of England 
 and Wales, for some valuable suggestions 
 made during the progress of the work. 
 
 A. N. 
 
 HAMPSTEAD : November 1876.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE . . i 
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL PART I7 
 
 THE VEGETABLE PART -56 
 
 THE ANIMAL PART 77 
 
 THE HUMAN PART 120 
 
 CONCLUSION 168 
 
 INDEX I7I
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 THE MAMMOTH Frontispiece 
 
 I. UPHEAVAL: SUBSIDENCE: DENUDATION to face page 51 
 
 II. DIFFERENT KINDS OF PLANTS OF THE 
 
 COAL FORESTS ,, 65 
 
 III. TRILOBITE 79 
 
 IV. FOOTPRINTS OF LABYRINTHODON : FOOT- 
 
 PRINTS OF BIRDS, (2) WITH MARKS 
 
 OF RAIN-DROPS .... ,, 83 
 
 V. FISH-REPTILES ,, 87 
 
 VI. BIRD-REPTILES . . . . .. ,, 93 
 
 VII. FOSSILS OF THE CHALK .... ,, 97 
 
 VIII. GIGANTIC IRISH STAG (CERVUS MEGA- 
 
 CEROS) ,, 108 
 
 IX. THE MEGATHERIUM ,, 112 
 
 X. i. FLINT ARROW-HEAD ; 2. STONE AXE 
 IN HANDLE ; 3. FLINT KNIFE ; 4. 
 BONE HARPOON ; 5. BONE NEEDLES ; 
 6. SCEPTRE MADE OF HORN ; 7. 
 MARROW SPOON . . . . ,, 129 
 
 XI. EXAMPLES OF PRE-HISTORIC DRAWINGS. ,, 135 
 
 XII. LAKE-DWELLINGS ,, 148 
 
 XIII. THE GUADALOUPE HUMAN FOSSIL . . ,, 159
 
 THE 
 
 PUZZLE OF LIFE. 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 You must often have looked with won- 
 dering eyes at this World of ours, and 
 asked yourselves questions about it. How 
 did it come here ? What is it made of ? 
 How old is it ? All of them questions not 
 to be answered without a great deal of 
 thought and study, and even then not so per- 
 fectly as we should like. It is easy to say "It 
 is here," and " It is made of earth," and " It 
 surely must be old," but that will not satisfy 
 us. We want to know something more cer- 
 tain than this, if possible. We can see that 
 a clock goes with wheels, but we are not very 
 intelligent people if we do not want to find 
 
 B
 
 2 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 out what makes the clock go. One way of 
 finding out is to pull things to pieces, but we 
 cannot exactly do this with the World. We 
 must think about it, and put together all the 
 knowledge we can gain from the outside and 
 inside, and from the other Worlds around us, 
 which we can see, and when we have done 
 this we may get something like answers to 
 our questions. 
 
 How did it come here ? But this is not 
 quite the right way of asking the question, 
 because the World is never for two moments 
 together in the same place. It is travelling 
 in a great circle round the Sun at the rate of 
 more than sixty thousand miles an hour, and 
 has been ever since it was formed. That 
 is a wonderful arrangement by which all 
 Worlds travel round some other World larger 
 than themselves, in greater or less circles, 
 and" we do not know why it is, though we 
 are certain that it is so. The Moon travels 
 round us once in about every month, and we 
 and the Moon together round the Sun once in 
 every year. 
 
 Then again, other planets, with their
 
 THE WORLD'S EARLY HISTORY. 3 
 
 moons, such as Jupiter, for instance, travel 
 round the Sun in much larger circles than our 
 World, and take many years to do the journey, 
 while Venus, which is nearer the Sun than we 
 are, travels in a much smaller circle,, and 
 takes less time. We do not perceive that 
 we are moving so fast because everything we 
 see is moving equally fast with us ; but. there 
 is no doubt that we are. spinning along at 
 sixty thousand miles an hour. 
 
 If we ask an astronomer how our World 
 came into existence, he will tell us that it is 
 probably a mass separated from the Sun, that 
 it was once red-hot, and that it slowly cooled 
 down until animals and plants could live upon 
 it. He will tell us besides, that he can see 
 mountains and valleys in our Moon> and land 
 and sea, snow and clouds, on the planet Mars, 
 with his great telescopes. When he thinks 
 about the planets and our own World, then 
 he believes them to be pieces of some much 
 larger World perhaps the Sun which now 
 travel round the Sun and receive their light 
 and heat from it. The World is made of what 
 we call " earth," and it is of this I mean to 
 
 B 2
 
 4 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 tell you now how it was formed, what 
 changes have taken place in it, what plants 
 and animals have lived upon it, and what 
 reasons there are for thinking that it is an 
 exceedingly old place, with a long and inter- 
 esting story to tell. 
 
 Little was known thirty or forty years ago 
 by the most learned men about the age of our 
 World, and it was thought that the human 
 race had not lived here very long. It was 
 indeed known that many large animals, whose 
 huge bones have been found, must have 
 lived before man came to inhabit the Earth, 
 and that even far smaller creatures such as 
 fishes, and crabs, and insects, and shell-fish 
 most probably lived for many generations, 
 and died and left their bones and shells in 
 the soil long before the first man or the 
 first tribes of men came to share the World 
 with them. I hope to be able to tell you some- 
 thing of the strange and beautiful history of 
 all these animals, and of man himself, and 
 to show you what reasons there are now for 
 thinking that the human race has inhabited 
 this Earth for a very long time indeed, and
 
 THE PARTS OF THE PUZZLE. 5 
 
 how all this knowledge has been gained and 
 put together piece by piece. It is something 
 like the different parts of a puzzle-map, 
 which might be scattered all over the house, 
 and found at one time or another in different 
 places, and at last made up altogether. 
 Some parts of the puzzle have not been 
 found yet certainly ; but so many have been 
 collected, and they fit into one another so 
 well, that we can begin to see its real shape 
 and size. It will perhaps be a very long time 
 before some of the missing pieces are found ; 
 but in the meantime we can go on without 
 them, and put the framework together, and no 
 doubt in time we shall see what our puzzle, 
 the history of life on the Earth, was like. 
 
 Before telling you what its parts are, I 
 ought to say where many of them have been 
 found, and how they are still being looked 
 for. They are found upon the ground, under 
 it, in caves, in rivers, and in the sea. Since 
 railways have been in use a great many tun- 
 nels have been made, as well as very deep 
 cuttings through hills, and some of these are 
 several miles long. In this way we have
 
 6 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 come to know something of the Earth below 
 the surface. Some of these tunnels are bored 
 right through high hills and even mountains, 
 and the cuttings are deep enough to hide 
 high houses if they were put into them. 
 While digging these the workmen have 
 found many of the parts of our puzzle, which 
 are the bones of animals, and fishes, and 
 shells, and even smaller things such as 
 insects. These could not possibly have 
 been put there by anyone, because they were 
 many, many yards below the surface, and, 
 until they were dug up, nobody imagined 
 that they could be there. Many other things 
 besides have been dug out of these places, 
 but nearer the surface, such as weapons and 
 tools made of flint, and stone, and bone, and 
 metal, and pieces of rough crockery, and 
 various ornaments, all of which must at 
 some time or other have been made and 
 used by people very like ourselves. In 
 digging canals, too, the same kinds of things 
 have been found, and some caves are almost 
 filled up with them. We have other means, 
 too, of knowing what is under the surface of
 
 WHERE THE PARTS ARE FOUND. ^ 
 
 the ground we walk upon. Many of the 
 coal-mines are so deep that the Tower of 
 London, or St. Paul's Cathedral, or York 
 Minster, or even the Pyramids of Egypt 
 could be buried in them ! In digging these 
 the workmen have had to go through a 
 great quantity of earth, sometimes chalk, 
 sand, or gravel, or clay or limestone, layer 
 upon layer, placed, like a pile of books of 
 different kinds and different thicknesses, one 
 upon the other, until they have come to 
 the coal. In these different layers of earth 
 parts of the puzzle have been found, and we 
 shall see by-and-by what parts have been 
 found in the coal itself. Then again, when 
 deep mines are made to get the metals, iron 
 and gold and silver, these layers of earth 
 have to be dug through ; and when the 
 beautiful kinds of stone, like marble and lime- 
 stone, are wanted, they must be dug out of 
 the sides of the hills, and in doing this still 
 more pieces of the puzzle come to hand. 
 But there are other places where Nature 
 herself seems to have shown us some of 
 them without the trouble of searching for
 
 8 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 them. In many parts of the World, by the 
 sea, and on the banks of rivers, there are 
 cliffs hundreds of feet high, like the chalk 
 cliffs at Dover and Ramsgate, and the sandy 
 cliffs at Folkestone and on the south coast 
 of Devonshire. These cliffs have been cut 
 into by the sea very gradually, and a kind 
 of wall has been left, and from the sides of 
 the cliffs great numbers of the pieces of the 
 puzzle, bones, shells, &c., have been col- 
 lected and taken away to museums. But 
 the little we can do with our mines and rail- 
 way tunnels is nothing in comparison with 
 the work of Nature. In some of the great 
 mountain chains the Andes, the Himalayas, 
 and the Alps, for instance parts of the sides 
 of mountains have fallen down, and rents 
 many miles long have been left, showing 
 what had been buried there in the different 
 kinds of soil ; and where rivers have cut 
 deep, narrow channels through the earth, 
 like the Canons of Colorado, these natural 
 miners have turned out more of the parts of 
 " the puzzle of life " than we can with all our 
 labour.
 
 WHERE THE PARTS ARE FOUND. 
 
 It will net be easy at first to understand 
 all the wonders I have to show you, but, when 
 we get further on, you will see them one 
 by one, and there will be very little diffi- 
 culty. You know now where these things 
 are to be found : principally in the ground 
 you walk upon, without knowing all there is 
 beneath you. The creatures here are much 
 more wonderful than any of the monsters of 
 fairy tale or fable, because the works of God 
 are greater than the imagination of men who 
 have invented the stories of flying dragons 
 and griffins, and trees which grew up into the 
 skies ; but I cannot help thinking that this 
 imagination shows what men thought might 
 once have been, and we shall see that " truth 
 is stranger than fiction." Creatures really did 
 live on this Earth of such strange shapes and 
 great size that the imaginations of those 
 who wrote the fairy tales did not exaggerate 
 much ; and, though we know that no flying 
 serpents or immense birds like the Roc are 
 living now, and that there is no beanstalk 
 which grows up into the sky while we are 
 asleep, we shall see that there were lizards as
 
 io THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 large as whales, and birds taller than ele- 
 phants, and great sloths stronger than the 
 rhinoceros or hippopotamus, and ferns as 
 high as oak trees, and mosses as large as 
 gooseberry bushes ; and that perhaps these 
 animals and plants grew much faster than 
 they do now, and that their dead bodies form 
 a very large part of the earth of our World. 
 This is not imagination, and when you go to 
 a museum you can see all these wonders for 
 yourselves, just as they were taken out of 
 the earth ; but of course the bones only of 
 the animals are there. The flesh has long 
 since gone away, and some of the stalks and 
 fronds (leaves) only of the ferns remain to 
 show us how large they must have been 
 when they were alive and growing. 
 
 It will be necessary to use a few scientific 
 names, most of which are borrowed from the 
 Greek and Latin languages, but I will ex- 
 plain the meaning of them all, so that they 
 will be easily remembered. First of all, 
 then, the pieces of the puzzle are called fos- 
 sils, and the name comes from a Latin word 
 meaning " dug out ; " because they have been
 
 THE PARTS ARE CALLED FOSSILS. n 
 
 dug out of the ground either by man in making 
 railways and mines, or by Nature in the many 
 ways in which she works by cutting down 
 cliffs and scooping out valleys. These fossils 
 are bones of animals and fishes, the skins, 
 shells, and wings of insects, and the stalks 
 and leaves of plants, some of which have 
 lain so very long in the ground that they have 
 become as hard and heavy as stone. But 
 the shape of them always remains, and the 
 moment you look at them you see that they 
 once belonged to living creatures. 
 
 I shall give you pictures of some of these 
 fossils ; and no doubt you will be able to find 
 some like them in the chalk and sands of the 
 seaside beautiful shells and bones of fishes. 
 You may pick these out of the cliffs, and then 
 go to the pools of salt water left among the 
 rocks by the ebbing tide, and compare your 
 fossils with the living shell-fish, and see how 
 nearly those inhabitants of the ancient oceans 
 resemble the creatures we find now, sporting 
 in the water, just as these fossils did when 
 the sand and chalk cliffs were under the sea. 
 Of course all the bright colours are gone
 
 12 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 from the fossils, for the colour of animals 
 fades away soon after they die, and the flesh 
 does not last long ; but the hard parts the 
 .bones and shells are not easily destroyed, 
 because they are made of the same material 
 as rocks. And when we look at the fossil 
 plants we see the same thing. The colours 
 of the green stems and leaves have quite 
 faded, but the delicate shapes of the leaves 
 and branches, and the grain of the wood, can 
 still be seen, and you will have no doubt that 
 they once lived and bore flowers and fruit, and 
 died, as plants are living and dying every day. 
 You have got so far now that you know 
 what fossils are, and where they may be 
 found. You know that they are the small 
 and large pieces of the " puzzle of life " of all 
 sorts of different shapes and sizes and you 
 know that they are scattered about the Earth, 
 deep down in coal-mines, on the tops of 
 mountains, at the bottoms of rivers, in deep 
 caves, and under the sea. The patience and 
 industry of clever men have been well spent 
 in gathering together all they can find, and 
 arranging them in museums for our instruc-
 
 THE SIGNS OF PAST LIFE. 13 
 
 tion, and making a history of them which is 
 more wonderful than the Arabian Nights, 
 and more beautiful because it is all true. 
 And, though you may think it strange that 
 I promise to show you creatures more mar- 
 vellous than those of the fairy tales, I shall 
 keep that promise faithfully. We shall find 
 no Genii with wonderful lamps and magic 
 rings, because they never really lived, though 
 it gave us much pleasure and amusement to 
 read about them ; but we shall see what God, 
 the greatest Genius of all, has done by means 
 of His magicians the laws of Nature. 
 These magicians have built up high moun- 
 tains and dug out valleys, and sent mighty 
 rivers sweeping down to the sea, and even 
 filled up oceans with sand and chalk, and 
 buried ancient forests deep down under sea 
 and land. They worked with fire, and air, 
 and water ; not quickly, but with such 
 strength that nothing could resist them, and 
 they gradually moulded the Earth into the 
 beautiful thing it is, so that 
 
 In contemplation of created things, 
 
 By steps we may ascend to God. Milton.
 
 H THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 But, lovely as the Earth is, we should not 
 perhaps have thought so much of it if there 
 had been nothing to discover. We see that 
 it has been prepared for us an immensely 
 long time ago ; and when we know a little, 
 we want to search further and find out what 
 the whole plan of Creation is, so far as we 
 can. You will be surprised when you know 
 how many signs of past life there are around 
 you many more than you can see with the 
 eye. The Earth is one great burying-place 
 of creatures which have passed away. You 
 are walking over their dead and fossil bodies 
 at almost every step. They are built into 
 the walls of our houses, and there are 
 millions of them in some of the commonest 
 stones of the pavement. Those round, 
 smooth pebbles, called flint stones, which we 
 pick out of the gravel walks, were once partly 
 such soft tender things as sponges ; but time 
 has hardened them, and they have been 
 rolled together in seas and rivers by the 
 always moving water until they have become 
 quite different to look at from the rough blue 
 flints they were when they were washed out
 
 THE SIGNS OF PAST LIFE. 15 
 
 of the chalk beds. When you are walking 
 along the sands of some seacoasts, you are 
 treading on little specks of these small flints 
 which have been ground down fine in that 
 great mill, the ocean. The sponges, then, 
 did some part in the building up of the 
 Earth. The very chalk you draw with is 
 composed of the shells of sea-animals. Your 
 slates and slate pencils were once a fine mud 
 at the bottom of the sea, since become so 
 hard that it is used for covering the roofs of 
 our houses, and in this mud lived myriads 
 of small shell-fish which have sometimes left 
 their frail houses in the slate beds to tell us 
 how they were made. That slate is the 
 hardened mud of an old sea bottom, there is 
 no doubt at all. 
 
 There are many other things in common 
 use which show us the life that was. 
 
 Perhaps you did not know that coals are 
 compressed plants, and that we are now 
 burning the vegetation of the past time ! 
 But these will be described in their right 
 places by-and-by, and you will see how 
 certain it is that some of the commonest
 
 1 6 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE. 
 
 things we use were living creatures and 
 graceful plants. 
 
 Here is " the framework " of the puzzle, 
 and I think you will agree with me that we 
 shall have pleasure in putting it together 
 with all the queerly-shaped pieces we shall 
 find in the following chapters. We have 
 fossil plants to show us what grew upon the 
 Earth, fossil bones to tell us what animals 
 lived here, and thousands of different kinds 
 of fossil shells and fishes to show us that 
 the seas in the long past time were crowded 
 with life ; and besides, though there are no 
 written histories of the men whom we shall 
 read about, they, too, have left many things 
 which they used in the caves where they lived 
 and in their graves, to make us feel certain 
 that they were some of the oldest people that 
 ever lived. With all these things to help us, it 
 will be strange if we cannot make out a great 
 deal of the history of life upon our Earth.
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 17 
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 You will have learned from other books 
 something about the size and shape of our 
 World : for instance, that it is a great round 
 body, or rather more like an orange, a little 
 flatter one way than the other, and about 
 8,000 miles through, from one side to the 
 other, and that it turns round once in every 
 twenty-four hours ; but I have only to tell 
 you now what it is made of. The material 
 is called rock, earth, or soil ; and there are 
 many kinds of it, such as granite, gravel, 
 clay, sand, chalk, mud, and so on ; and we 
 shall see that many of these different soils 
 contain different fossils. 
 
 It is supposed that a very long time 
 passed while these were being laid one upon 
 another, and before many plants or animals 
 lived here, and there are good reasons for 
 
 c
 
 i8 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 thinking that underneath these soils the 
 Earth is very hot, perhaps in a melting state, 
 because we know that volcanoes like Vesuvius 
 and .^Etna throw out flame and smoke and 
 lava, which is melted earth and rock ; and 
 that this lava has run down the sides of the 
 mountains for miles, in a great stream of 
 liquid material, and covered up and destroyed 
 whole villages and towns. You have heard 
 of earthquakes, when the ground shakes and 
 cracks, and houses are thrown down, as they 
 have often been in Spain, Italy, and South 
 America. This convinces us that the inside 
 of the earth must be very different from the out- 
 side. Two or three years ago Mount Vesuvius 
 was boiling up, and the people of Naples feared 
 that it would throw out some of the terrible 
 lava and red-hot cinders, and burn up their 
 vineyards and perhaps injure their city ; and 
 during the last two or three years many 
 people have been killed by earthquakes in 
 South America. These things seldom hap- 
 pen in the North of Europe, and when they 
 do they are only slightly felt, and people are 
 not killed, neither are houses thrown down.
 
 VOLCANOES AND EARTHQUAKES. 19 
 
 Still, this shows that there must be some 
 great force underneath us, and very much 
 heat. We see nothing of this when we 
 look upon the green fields, and we should 
 scarcely think it possible if there were not 
 histories about these eruptions, as they are 
 called. But when I tell you that I have felt 
 the Earth tremble, and seen fire rushing out 
 from the top of a high mountain whose sides 
 were covered with snow, you will understand 
 how real it is though it may seem so strange. 
 
 People at one time liked to fancy that 
 powerful spirits lived in volcanoes and made 
 them their workshops : but we know better 
 now. 
 
 Well, the interior of the Earth is evidently 
 very different from the part we live upon ; 
 and it is the outside we have to think about 
 now, which would be dreadfully cold if the 
 sun did not shine upon it, though the inside 
 is so hot. 
 
 I have called this " the Geological Part," 
 and the name Geological comes from two 
 Greek words meaning "a talk about the earth; " 
 but now you know it in its English dress it 
 
 C 2
 
 20 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 will be easy to recollect it. Geology is then the 
 study of the many kinds of rocks and fossils 
 which make up our World, but we must know 
 something of the way in which they are placed. 
 
 You may have noticed, if you have made 
 many journeys to different parts of England 
 or Wales, that the rocks or soils are very 
 different in various places. Sometimes we 
 find numerous chalk-pits, as in parts of Kent, 
 or Sussex ; if we go into Devonshire we may 
 notice the very red colour of the soil and of the 
 cliffs, especially near Sidmouth, Dawlish, and 
 Teignmouth ; in North Wales we find great 
 quarries and hills of slate ; while around 
 London we see a great deal of clay used for 
 making bricks, and called the London clay, 
 as well as many pits in gravel so useful for 
 making paths and mending roads, and in Kent 
 and Sussex chalk cliffs and hills are common. 
 
 Now after studying these various rocks 
 all over our country, we find that there is a 
 certain regular order in which they are found ; 
 some have been made a long time before 
 others, and while most kinds contain some 
 fossils, those found in the oldest rocks are
 
 HOW THE ROCKS ARE PLACED. 21 
 
 much less like the living plants and animals 
 than the fossils we find in the newer rocks. 
 
 But you will want to know how it is that 
 we can tell that one rock is older than 
 another, when both appear at the surface of 
 the earth. It would take a long time to 
 make sure of this for ourselves, but it will be 
 enough to say that the various cliffs, quarries, 
 and railway-cuttings often show one kind of 
 rock resting upon another, and these always 
 occur in a certain order. Thus we never find 
 the Chalk resting on the London Clay, but we 
 constantly find the London Clay resting on 
 the Chalk. And this is proved in another 
 way, by deep well-borings. Underneath 
 London many wells have been carried down 
 right through the London Clay, and if only 
 continued deep enough they always reach 
 the Chalk. In the same way, the order of 
 the other rocks has been ascertained in 
 different parts of the country, by examining 
 all the pits and quarries, and cliffs and cut- 
 tings, with the help of what knowledge can 
 be obtained from deep mines and wells. 
 
 You will now begin to wonder why the
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 older rocks should appear at the surface. I 
 have told you about earthquakes, and you 
 will find that many dreadful earthquakes 
 must in former times have ravaged our 
 country. The reason why the old rocks 
 come to the surface is because they have 
 been lifted up sometimes violently, but more 
 often very slowly. And the newer rocks 
 which formerly rested on them have very 
 often been quite washed away, either by the 
 sea or by rivers and little streams which for- 
 merly acted upon them. 
 
 Suppose then we take six books, some 
 thick and some thin, and pile them up to- 
 gether on the table, the lowest being a good 
 thick one. The lowest we will call granite, 
 the next slate, the third sandstone, the fourth 
 coal, the fifth chalk, and the sixth the London 
 clay. These will represent some of the 
 principal kinds of earths, and you can fancy 
 many more with other names coming between 
 them ; but the London clay can never be 
 below the granite nor the chalk below the 
 coal, for the great coal beds were formed long 
 before the chalk and clay. They generally
 
 THE RAISING OF THE ROCKS. 23 
 
 come in much the same order as we have 
 named them, hard rocks like granite at the 
 bottom, and softer earths, like sandstone, chalk 
 and clay, a long way above them. But we do 
 not always find all these earths in one place 
 even if we dig ever so deeply, though the 
 granite would always be found at the bottom 
 if we went deep enough. 
 
 Sometimes the granite and other old rocks 
 have been pushed through the upper layers 
 by some great force, and have broken 
 them and risen above them in magnificent 
 mountain chains, like those of the Andes in 
 South, and the Rocky Mountains in North 
 America, the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, 
 the Grampians in Scotland, and the Cornish 
 mountains in England. We can easily sup- 
 pose that the lowest of our books (the granite 
 book) has been pushed upwards by some 
 great force from below, and parts of it broken 
 through the others, and raised high above 
 them; and this is what has actually been 
 done with real rocks. And as this kind of 
 upheaval has taken place at different periods 
 of the earth's history, we find that granites 
 have come to the surface at different times.
 
 24 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 When the layers are thus broken through 
 they are often tilted up on end and tumbled 
 about in confusion. But where there has 
 been no disturbance like this, they generally 
 rest evenly upon one another in their proper 
 order. 
 
 Granite, and rocks of the same kind, are 
 not in the least like chalk, or clay, or even 
 sandstone, and when once you have seen any 
 of these you will not be likely to mistake it 
 for the others. Granite is excessively hard, 
 and has a beautiful appearance when polished, 
 with a number of brilliant white and some 
 dark specks in it. It is used for paving the 
 streets of towns, for which purpose it is cut 
 into oblong blocks, and for the pillars of fine 
 buildings. Sometimes it is dark brown, 
 sometimes reddish, but generally a bluish 
 grey. This rock is composed of a great 
 quantity of crystals, and for this reason it is 
 thought it must have been melted at one 
 time by intense heat in the earth, and after- 
 wards slowly cooled. Chalk is very different, 
 and sandstone, though it is also hard, not in 
 the least like granite.
 
 HOW THE ROCKS WERE FORMED. 25 
 
 HOW THE ROCKS WERE FORMED. 
 
 What I have just said is about all that we 
 know of the formation of the oldest and hard- 
 est granite rocks : but there is something going 
 on now which confirms the belief that the 
 materials of which they are made were melted 
 together by a greater heat than we can make 
 in our furnaces for melting iron ; for I should 
 tell you that it is easier to melt iron and 
 copper than granite rocks. Volcanoes often 
 throw out melted earths which when cooled 
 appear to be made of much the same mate- 
 rials as these granites. 
 
 SANDSTONE. 
 
 But we know more of the manner of the 
 formation of sandstone. This rock is com- 
 posed of rounded grains of sand just like that 
 we find upon the sea shore. If you take a 
 handful of this sand and squeeze it tightly, 
 it will keep together a little while. Now 
 suppose a quantity of this sand was pressed 
 by a very great weight the weight of a
 
 26 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 large hill for instance after many years the 
 grains would stick firmly together, and be- 
 come a sort of stone. It is in this way the 
 sandstones must have been formed, and per- 
 haps heat helped the work, though not so 
 great a heat as melted the granite. The 
 sand, after it had been washed upon the sea 
 shore, became gradually covered with other 
 earths hundreds of feet thick, and the im- 
 mense weight above it pressed it into stone : 
 but you may imagine how very long a time 
 it took to do this. Sandstones are used for 
 building, but they do not last very long ; the 
 frost makes little cracks in them and they 
 soon crumble away to the grains of sand of 
 which they were made. Several fossils are 
 found in some of these sandstones, which 
 have been formed at many different periods 
 of the earth's history. 
 
 CHALK. 
 
 You have seen those high cliffs of chalk 
 along the south coast of England, perhaps, 
 and you have wondered what that beautiful
 
 THE CHALK BEDS. 27 
 
 white earth was, and how it came there. It 
 is found in many parts of the world, and 
 the south and south-east of England are to a 
 great extent composed of it. The material 
 is called by chemists carbonate of lime. It 
 is almost entirely made up of minute shells 
 called foraminifera, from two Latin words 
 which mean that there are many openings or 
 chambers in their shells, and there are many 
 beautiful fossils called ammonites imbedded in 
 the chalk. These are shell-fish, two or three 
 inches, and sometimes a foot across, and their 
 shape is very like that of the young leaves of 
 the common fern before it has opened in the 
 spring. 
 
 Millions of these tiny foraminifera are 
 living now in parts of the Atlantic and Pacific 
 oceans, and when they die their shells sink 
 to the bottom and form a greyish mud, some- 
 thing like chalk. 
 
 When H.M.S. " Challenger " was sent out 
 in the year 1873, to find out what was at the 
 bottom of the deepest seas of the World, 
 great interest was felt in the expedition, 
 because we were sure that we should learn
 
 28 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 something about the manner in which some 
 of the rocks were formed. 
 
 We knew that the whole of the beds of 
 the present seas must be receiving the wash- 
 ings of the rivers and the bodies of many 
 fishes and animals, and that the rocks of the 
 future must be forming down there by these 
 accumulations. Long lines were let down from 
 the ship with a dredge at the end, and thus 
 parts of the bottom of the sea were brought 
 up and carefully examined. It was found 
 that the washings, stones, clay, and mud of 
 the land were carried hundreds of miles out 
 to sea, and laid upon the bottom. But in the 
 deeper parts, where the Alps would be almost 
 covered there was a fine grey mud com- 
 posed almost entirely of the shells of the 
 little foraminifera, and this, no doubt, is the 
 chalk of future times, or perhaps limestone 
 of a harder kind. Deeper, too, than where 
 this grey mud is found, there is a reddish 
 mud, exceedingly fine and soft. We cannot 
 exactly say yet whether this is formed from 
 the remains of shell-fish ; but it is, at all 
 events, very like the clay of the land, and in
 
 CHALK UNDER THE OCEAN. 29 
 
 some future time will most likely become like 
 that stiff mud we know so well. So that 
 even the materials for bricks are being made 
 now, and perhaps when all those hundreds 
 of islands scattered about the Pacific Ocean 
 are joined into one great Continent, this red 
 mud will be raised and made use of for build- 
 ing the houses of new peoples and nations. 
 
 When we see this going on now, of course 
 it is very easy to conclude that the chalk, a 
 great deal of which is above the sea now, 
 must have been formed in the same way at the 
 bottom of an ancient ocean, and afterwards 
 raised by the same kind of upward force which 
 made the granite break through other earths. 
 
 If we did not know that the same cause was 
 at work now, and that the same kinds of shell- 
 fish were living and laying down new beds of 
 chalk under the sea, we should not know 
 how to account for the quantities of chalk in 
 the world. For innumerable agest hese little 
 creatures have thus been paving the floor of 
 the ocean with their dead bodies, and you 
 may suppose that countless millions of them 
 must have lived and died ! In some of the
 
 30 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 chalks the shells of the foraminifera can be 
 quite distinctly seen with a microscope, and 
 when these are compared with the shells of 
 living ones, they are seen to be almost exactly 
 alike. Next time you pass through one of the 
 railway cuttings through the chalk in going to 
 Brighton, or Ramsgate, or Dover, remember 
 that those high cliffs were built up by these 
 Liliputian giants under the sea, and you may 
 think of the chalk as " foraminifera earth." 
 
 COAL. 
 
 You see this black shining substance 
 almost every day, and you know it is dug up 
 from very deep pits where the poor miners are 
 often killed by explosions of gas escaping 
 from it. But it is as well to know what 
 it is and how it comes to be so useful to us. 
 In the language of chemistry it is called 
 " carbon," and a great writer has given it the 
 poetical name of " compressed sunlight." But 
 you will ask how sunlight could possibly 
 get into a deep mine, and how it could be 
 compressed there. You will see that the
 
 THE COAL BEDS. 31 
 
 explanation is really quite simple by-and-by. 
 This coal was once above ground, and was 
 a splendid forest of waving palm-trees, and 
 ferns, and gigantic mosses, as you will see by 
 the pictures of the fossils of them. 
 
 Many of the animals and plants of past 
 times were giants compared to those living 
 now, of the same species or kind, and many 
 of the plants of the present time are dwarfs 
 to those of the same kind which formed the 
 coal beds. Many generations of trees must 
 have grown and died, and others must have 
 sprung up, and so on, until beds of them, 
 some ten, others twenty, or even thirty feet 
 thick, were formed. Here, buried in the 
 coal, are the stems, leaves, bark, roots, fruit, 
 and seeds of these trees, and we can have no 
 doubt that almost the whole of the coal is 
 composed of them. You must not expect to 
 find the shapes of these in every piece of coal 
 you may happen to look at, because most of 
 it has been greatly changed by the great 
 weight and pressure upon it, and the length 
 of time : but it is certainly all the same sub- 
 stance wood turned into coal. The fossil
 
 32 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 plants of the coal are of course entirely 
 black, but there is no mistake about their 
 having once been living plants. 
 
 You will ask perhaps how the coal came 
 to be buried so deep. It is not so always, 
 being sometimes at the surface. But just as 
 the granite has been pushed up through the 
 other rocks, so has the coal in some places 
 been uplifted and in others has sunk down. 
 It was often covered up by other earths to 
 a great depth, after the trees which com- 
 posed it had died ; but where it is now at 
 the surface these newer earths have been 
 afterwards worn away. When the sun shone 
 upon these coal trees they took its warmth 
 and light into their stems and leaves, for they 
 could not live without, and this made them 
 grow so fast and become so large that it is 
 not untrue to call coal " compressed sunlight." 
 Charcoal is in some respects so like coal that 
 it would seem to you at once that they were 
 probably the same material. Charcoal is 
 simply burnt wood, and when the coal forests 
 had died down, and when these beds sank 
 down beneath other layers the pressure and
 
 CLAY, MUD, AND GRAVEL. 33 
 
 heat together turned the wood and leaves 
 into a hard mass like charcoal in colour, but 
 heavier and more solid, and just enough of the 
 stems and leaves have been left to enable 
 us to know with certainty that coal was once 
 wood. 
 
 We light our fires now and drive our 
 steam-engines with the heat of the sun which 
 shone upon the coal forests, and has been 
 stored up for many thousands of years in the 
 Earth, to be brought out once more to give 
 us light and warmth. 
 
 CLAY AND MUD. 
 
 While the ancient forests were growing 
 up to form the coal beds, and the foramini- 
 fera were slowly building up the chalk, as I 
 have explained, the Earth was covered with 
 water in some places which are now dry land, 
 and the sea now flows over parts of the 
 World which were once the habitations of 
 plants and animals. These great changes 
 have left their marks upon many a mountain 
 side, and many an old river or sea bed has 
 become filled up. A map of Europe during 
 D
 
 34 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 the chalk period would show that the places 
 where Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Berlin 
 now are were then under the ocean ; but 
 since then these places have been lifted up, 
 and mud, clay, and gravel swept over the 
 chalk in many places by the action of new 
 rivers and seas. Water, you perceive, has 
 had a great deal to do with these changes, 
 and indeed it is one of Nature's most power- 
 ful tools, for it can wash down rocks and 
 cliffs and cut its way in rivers for thousands 
 of miles over the Earth's surface. It carries 
 down mud, and clay, and gravel, and this 
 soil, which has been named alluvium, is one 
 of the most interesting of all to us, because it 
 contains the bones of the immense animals we 
 shall talk about presently, as well as those of 
 the oldest races of men with their weapons 
 and ornaments. 
 
 The mud age, and we are in the mud 
 and gravel age now, belongs to what is called 
 the Tertiary period, and we shall see that 
 this age has lasted a very long time already, 
 so long that though it is still going on, the 
 most extraordinary animals have lived and
 
 CLAY, MUD, AND GRAVEL. 35 
 
 died, and not one of them is now left alive. 
 Still the same washing and cutting of water is 
 going on which buried their bones in swamps, 
 and bogs, and river caves, and may perhaps 
 carry away some of the bones of us who are 
 living now, to be found ages afterwards by 
 future generations who will read our history 
 in these silent witnesses, as we read the history 
 of the tree fern sand foraminifera in the coal 
 and the chalk. 
 
 The present age of the World's history 
 is the Mud age, or, as we shall call it in future, 
 the Tertiary period, and I think you will agree 
 with me when I come to describe it, that it 
 contains the most interesting of all the pieces 
 of " the puzzle of life." 
 
 The earth of the Tertiary period is very 
 different from a great many of the older 
 earths. Clay, mud, and gravel are the wash- 
 ings only of the older rocks, the fine par- 
 ticles which have been worn off from them 
 by frost and water and carried down by 
 rivers and left in large beds, and sometimes 
 they have a good deal of decayed wood and 
 weeds mixed with them. Here are found 
 
 D2
 
 36 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 the bones of the great animals which were so 
 much larger and stronger than those of the 
 same kind living now, or any that lived 
 before them. 
 
 UPHEAVAL AND DEPRESSION. 
 
 These two words are so often used in 
 books on geology that we shall not be able 
 to get on without knowing their meaning. We 
 have seen that the rocks have been formed 
 in a certain way some by heat, some by 
 water, and some by dead forests and 
 that they lie over one another in pretty 
 regular order. But this order has sometimes 
 been disturbed and the layers have been 
 tumbled about among one another very 
 much. In some places the older rocks, such 
 as granite, slate, and sandstone, have been 
 pushed up through those above, and in 
 others the coal has sunk down and been 
 covered with thick layers of chalk, sand, and 
 mud. When the force below pushes a layer 
 up through the others it is called upheaval, 
 and when a layer sinks down it is called 
 depression, or subsidence. Both these actions
 
 UPHEAVAL AND DEPRESSION. 37 
 
 are going on now in different parts of the 
 Earth. A great part of Sweden, Norway, 
 and Denmark, of Spitsbergen, Siberia, and 
 the north of America, is being slowly raised 
 higher above the sea, as we know by the 
 height their old sea beaches now are above 
 the water ; while part of the shore of 
 America opposite to Europe and also the 
 south of Greenland is slowly sinking down, 
 as we know by the remains of land animals 
 and trees which are now covered by the 
 tide ; and at many places on the coast 
 of India this subsidence is also going on. 
 Nearer home, too, there is an example 
 of it in the island of Guernsey. All round 
 the coast of this island, like that of Jersey, are 
 found tree trunks and other remains of old 
 forest land beneath the water. Old histo- 
 ries refer to this as dry land ; and if a map 
 of it made in 1406 is correct, this land must 
 have sunk about 1 50 feet since that time. 
 
 Thus we can see, even at the present 
 time, the very same changes which have 
 worked upon our Earth for innumerable 
 ages. It is now easy to understand how the
 
 38 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 forests which must have grown above in the 
 air have, after a long time, sunk down to a 
 great depth, and been turned into coal, and 
 covered with the sediment, sand, gravel, 
 and chalk from the seas which afterwards 
 flowed over the places where they grew. 
 
 Sometimes the rocks by the sea shore are 
 cut into terraces or steps by the constant 
 wear of the water, and when we see these 
 water marks far above the present level of the 
 sea we know that the land must have been 
 lifted up gradually above the sea. There are 
 many such terraces in Norway. To prove 
 whether this is so marks have been cut upon 
 rocks at a measured height above the sea, 
 and after some years these marks have been 
 noticed to have been raised much above 
 the water by the " upheaval " of the earth at 
 that place. 
 
 Generally this change of level has taken 
 place gradually, and the greatest work in 
 moving the layers of earth and displacing 
 them has been very slow. But in some places 
 violent and sudden shocks have happened, 
 tearing up the rocks and piling them up in
 
 ISLANDS APPEAR AND DISAPPEAR. 39 
 
 heaps ; and now and then islands have sud- 
 denly appeared in the sea and vanished out 
 of sight completely in a short time. Islands 
 have thus come up in the Mediterranean Sea 
 within the memory of man. In the year 1831 
 the island of Julia suddenly appeared near the 
 coast of Sicily, and since the year 186 B.C. no 
 less than three islands have started up in the 
 bay of the island of Santorin. In this century 
 islands have appeared among the Azores, the 
 Indian Archipelago, the Philippines, the 
 Moluccas, and on the coast of Kamtschatka 
 and other places. Some of these have ap- 
 peared suddenly, others slowly, and they no 
 doubt have been raised by a great force from 
 below. 
 
 You will see now how easy it is to account 
 for the changes of the places of the layers of 
 rock. The same thing is going on now which 
 has been going on throughout all time, only 
 perhaps with more energy formerly than now, 
 making mountains, islands, and continents, 
 raising up a large tract of land in one place 
 and sinking an island or a sea shore in 
 another.
 
 40 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 These changes have been of great use to 
 us too. Suppose all England had been covered 
 with coal or slate, we should not have been 
 able to grow anything! As it is we have 
 sand and gravel in one county, chalk in 
 another, slate or granite in another, and coal 
 down below in several, and we can grow a 
 great variety of plants on all these different 
 soils. We have to thank " upheaval " and 
 " depression " for this. The force which is 
 always working below us has turned up the 
 different soils like a gigantic plough, and 
 brought some to the top and covered others, 
 so that instead of having to dig down deeper 
 than ever we have yet, we have only to go 
 from one county to another to find the 
 different rocks. We know that we could not 
 get at the coal in Sussex without going down 
 an unknown depth through the chalk and 
 other earths, but we dig for it in the North 
 of England, where we know its depth below 
 the surface. 
 
 I will try now to give you some idea of 
 the way in which the rocks come in their 
 order, or the succession of formations as
 
 THE SUCCESSION OF FORMATIONS. 41 
 
 geologists call it. If we started to walk from 
 Wales to London the rocks we should pass 
 over would be slate and flagstones in 
 Wales, and going en towards London, lime- 
 stone, old red sandstone, more limestones, 
 coal beds, new red sandstone, oolite, green- 
 sand, chalk, and last London clay. We 
 might not always find each of these near the 
 surface, but they would be found to be the 
 principal rocks on a line between Wales and 
 London, the oldest being in Wales and the 
 newest or most recent as we get nearer 
 London. That word " oolite " which I used 
 comes from two Greek words meaning " roe " 
 and " stone," because the rock is composed of 
 little rounded grains of a chalky substance 
 shaped like the hard roe of a fish, or like 
 sago before it is cooked. 
 
 If you look at the following table you will 
 see how the principal rocks are placed one 
 upon the other, beginning at the lowest or 
 oldest at the bottom and going up to the 
 newest at the top of the table, and on the 
 right hand side I have written the names of 
 the principal fossils which each kind of earth 
 contains.
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 TABLE OF THE SUCCESSION OF FORMATIONS. 
 
 
 ("Peat-bogs and caves 
 River-mud and brick- 
 earth, gravels, and 
 boulder clay (allu- 
 vium) 
 
 Crag of Eastern Coun- 
 ties 
 i London clay, &c. 
 
 / Chalk (with and with- 
 out flints) 
 
 1 Greensand and gault 
 
 \ Wealden clay, &c. 
 
 ("Portland stone 
 
 I Kimmeridge clay 
 Coral rag 
 
 I Oxford clay 
 
 ^ Combrash and forest 
 marble 
 
 j Great oolite 
 
 I Fullers' earth 
 
 [Lower oolite 
 Lias clay and lime- 
 stone 
 New red marl and 
 
 sandstone 
 Coal 
 
 Millstone grit 
 Mountain limestone 
 Old red sandstone 
 Silurian limestones and 
 slates 
 
 I Cambrian slates 
 Laurentian rocks 
 
 IGNEOUS, [ Greenstone, basalt 
 or Volcanic -j Porphyry 
 Rocks (Granite, &c. 
 
 Fossil Man, with stone im- 
 plements, &c., mammoth, 
 hippopotamus, rhinoce- 
 ros, Irish stag, cave lion, 
 &c. 
 
 Numerous shell-fish, mas- 
 todon 
 
 Turtles, crocodiles, shell- 
 fish 
 
 Foraminifera, &c. , sponges, 
 corals, sea-urchins, shell- 
 fish (Belemnites, Am- 
 monites, &c.), fishes 
 
 Immense reptiles, the Ich- 
 thyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, 
 Megalosaurus, Pterodac- 
 tyl, &c. 
 
 Animals allied to the opos- 
 sum and kangaroo 
 Cycads and other plants 
 
 Ferns, club-mosses, a few 
 firs, calamites, &c., in 
 great abundance 
 
 Numerous corals, shell- 
 fish, trilobites, fishes, &c. 
 
 The Laurentian rocks con- 
 tain the oldest known 
 fossil, the Eozoon (or 
 " life-dawn animal ") 
 
 Of various ages (no fossils)
 
 THE CHANGES HAVE BEEN GRADUAL. 43 
 
 If you read this table upwards from the 
 bottom you will notice that life began in a 
 very small way with Eozoon (the "life-dawn 
 animal "), that fishes appeared afterwards, that 
 the wonderful forests of the coal period then 
 grew and were covered up by other rocks 
 and pressed into solid coal, that numbers of 
 great crocodile-like animals lived all through 
 the oolite time, how the deep wide beds 
 of chalk were laid down by humble fora- 
 minifera, and when we get to the recent 
 newest beds of gravel, mud, sand, clay, &c., 
 the sweepings by water of the older rocks 
 ground down by ages of wear and tear, we 
 have the mammoth, mastodon, megatherium, 
 and other great vegetable eaters, and lastly 
 Man himself with his simple weapons of 
 stone, bone, and horn our early forefathers. 
 
 You must always keep in mind that the 
 greatest of these changes have taken place 
 very slowly. Mountains have been raised, 
 and whole continents have been sunk by 
 movements so slow that if the hands of a 
 clock went only once round the dial in a year 
 the hand would go faster than these mountains
 
 44 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 have risen or the continents sunk. Almost 
 always whenever there has been sudden and 
 violent action it has been near volcanoes or 
 during- earthquakes ; but these things, terrible 
 as they are to the people living near, disturb 
 only a very small part of the surface, and 
 such violence neither buried the coal beds 
 nor raised the slate hills of Wales. Many of 
 the small effects of the internal force of the 
 earth have been sudden and violent, but the 
 greatest and grandest have been slower than 
 anything we can imagine. 
 
 If this had not been so, we should not 
 find fossil shells just as they sank quietly to 
 the bottom of ancient seas, quite undisturbed. 
 We should not find delicate ferns and insects 
 with all their breakable parts perfectly pre- 
 served, and as lightly laid as if you had 
 put them away carefully in a cabinet upon 
 cotton wool. Yet many of these have sunk 
 down hundreds of feet below the open air 
 where they must have lived. We find the 
 ripple marks of the waves on old sandstones, 
 and even the prints of the feet of birds and 
 animals as they walked upon that rock when
 
 THE ICE AGE. 45 
 
 it was soft sand, and the little pits made 
 by rain-drops on the moist earth. All this 
 speaks of stillness, and gentle movement, no 
 violence. So slowly and softly have these 
 rocks settled down, that we can read in them 
 the history of the life that was. But if there 
 had been any sudden and rough movement 
 all these fossils might have been broken up 
 and we should have had nothing but frag- 
 ments, and the "puzzle of life" could never 
 have been put together. Nature's forces are 
 immense, but they work slowly, irresistibly, 
 and majestically. 
 
 THE ICE AGE. 
 
 We have seen now what the principal rocks 
 are made of and the way in which their places 
 have been changed by upheaval and depres- 
 sion. Water, as we know, has been at work 
 and has done great things in all ages of the 
 World's history. I have called it " one of 
 Nature's most powerful tools," and when we 
 look at the quantity of chalk alone that there 
 is in the world, and remember that this was all 
 laid down in water, and perhaps a great part
 
 46 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 of its lime carried down by rivers to the seas 
 where it settled to the bottom, after the 
 corals and small shell-fish had worked it into 
 their bodies, we are right in thinking water 
 a great Magician indeed. Why, even so 
 small a river as the Thames carries down to 
 the sea every year as much dissolved earth 
 as would make a good large hill ; and what 
 must such rivers as the Nile, the Amazon, 
 the Mississippi, and the great Chinese rivers 
 do ! There must have been gigantic rivers, 
 too, in the old times, or else it would have 
 been impossible that the deep sandstone and 
 slate beds could have been formed ; for these 
 are all laid down by the washing away of 
 earth in water. 
 
 Ice, which is only solid water, has also 
 been a powerful tool in shaping the surface 
 of the Earth, but it has not been always at 
 work as water has. Ice now covers only a 
 comparatively small part of the globe near the 
 north and south poles, and mountains like 
 those in Switzerland ; but by watching what 
 ice is doing now in these places we are able 
 to be certain that there has been a time when
 
 ICEBERGS AND GLACIERS. 47 
 
 it covered Scotland, Cumberland, Wales, 
 Sweden and Norway, and nearly all North 
 America. In watching the great " rivers of 
 ice," called glaciers, in the Alps, for instance, 
 we see that they slip down from the moun- 
 tains slowly, creeping on year by year, and 
 bringing with them pieces of rock and stones. 
 We see also where they have melted that they 
 have been grinding the rocks beneath them 
 with their great weight, and have cut grooves 
 into, and scraped and polished the hardest 
 granite. The stones underneath the glaciers 
 have been pressed so heavily upon the rocks 
 that they have left deep marks, and we find 
 the same kinds of marks and heaps of stones 
 in many mountains where there are no 
 glaciers now. There are other things too 
 which convince us that a great ice sheet 
 spread over almost the whole of Great Britain. 
 When the huge icebergs break away from 
 the frozen shores of Greenland and North 
 America, they often have frozen into their 
 ice large blocks of rock, sand, gravel, &c., 
 and when they drift into the warmer seas of 
 the south they melt, and of course these
 
 48 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 blocks or " boulders," as they are called, sink 
 to the bottom. Just the same kind of boul 
 ders are found in many parts of the world, 
 where icebergs never come now, and as they 
 are of a different rock from that on which 
 they lie, they must have been brought there 
 somehow. We naturally suppose then that 
 they were brought by icebergs. Sometimes 
 boulders of granite have been found thus 
 among clay, many miles from where there 
 are any granite rocks on the surface, and 
 there can be no doubt that they were origin- 
 ally frozen into an iceberg, which floated away 
 with them and when it melted left them so far 
 from their native place. In many of the mid- 
 land and eastern counties once floated these 
 icebergs, dropping the stones and boulders 
 which they brought away from the Welsh, 
 Cumberland, and Scottish mountains. 
 
 The climate of the earth must have been 
 fearfully cold when our country was covered 
 with ice, just as Greenland is now. Geologists 
 suppose that there must have been more 
 than one age of ice, and that between these 
 ages the climate of the world was pretty
 
 DENUDATION. 49 
 
 much the same as at present, although it is 
 certain that there were periods when Eng- 
 land was much warmer, because many of 
 the fossil plants could not have grown in a 
 cold climate. 
 
 You will want to know whether there 
 were any land animals living during the ice 
 periods. It is impossible to be quite certain, 
 but it is most likely that the mammoth was 
 living both before and during the last ice age, 
 because its bones have been found among 
 the earths brought down by the glaciers. 
 
 1 have said all you will be likely to re- 
 member at present about the nature of the 
 different rocks, but it will help you to under- 
 stand better how they have been laid one 
 upon the other, and how they have been 
 moved and broken by upheaval and sub- 
 sidence, if you look at the drawings on 
 page 51. 
 
 DENUDATION. 
 
 It has often happened that some of the 
 harder and older rocks, like granite and 
 slate, have pushed themselves through those
 
 50 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 earths lying above them, and then the sea 
 or a great river has washed away all the 
 earths from one side of the rock. The rain, 
 too, falling for thousands of years, has swept 
 them down into the valleys and mixed them 
 together. This is called denudation, or 
 " laying bare " the harder rocks by washing 
 the softer ones away from them. Those 
 beds of pebbles on the sea shore also have 
 been battering against the rocks for ages and 
 very gradually wearing them away, as you 
 can see if you watch the stones being 
 driven into and sucked out of holes and 
 cracks by every wave. Thus, both the 
 loose stones and the solid rocks get polished 
 and ground away, and Nature is always 
 destroying and making again by turns. If 
 this destruction went on continually without 
 any raising of the land to make up for it, the 
 surface of the whole Earth would in time 
 become level ; but old sea beds are always 
 being slowly raised above the water and 
 prepared for the growth of plants and the 
 habitation of animals. 
 
 If you watch the little rills of water on
 
 Denudation. 
 E 2
 
 DENUDA TION. 53 
 
 any rainy day, trickling down a hill, or the 
 springs which bubble up at the foot of cliffs 
 on the sea shore, you will see an example of 
 denudation in a small way. The earth is 
 washed off the surface here and there, and 
 carried down and laid up in banks in some 
 places, and the harder ground underneath is 
 laid bare. Little beds of stones are collected 
 in one place, and sticks and straws and such 
 light things in another, and this is just what 
 has been done on a large scale in mountain 
 regions, all over the world for many cen- 
 turies. 
 
 In the uppermost sketch on page 51 you 
 will see how the granite has been lifted 
 up with the layers of other earth along its 
 sides, and afterwards even layers have been 
 deposited above ; in the second there has 
 been a great crack in the land, and a great 
 mass of rock has subsided, and the hollow has 
 become filled up in time with clay, and mould, 
 and rich soil, so that some one has built a 
 house and made a garden on it ; in the third 
 the river has cut a gorge in rocks which were 
 once continuous from cliff to cliff, wearing
 
 54 THE GEOLOGICAL PART. 
 
 away the softer earths more easily than the 
 harder. If the Earth was cut into in different 
 places we should find the rocks arranged in a 
 very similar way to that in the three sketches. 
 
 BOILING SPRINGS, ETC. 
 
 In several different countries there are 
 very strange sights, but scarcely anything 
 is more astonishing than the fountains of 
 boiling water which shoot up out of the 
 ground. There are a good many of them 
 not far from us, in Iceland, and many 
 hundreds in Wyoming in America, and they 
 are called " geysers." Steam and boiling 
 water, and sometimes mud, are thrown up by 
 these natural fountains to a height of 200 feet 
 as high as the top of the spire of a church. 
 The water must come from a great depth 
 in the ground perhaps many thousand feet 
 down where the heat is intense. This water 
 springing up with clouds of snow-white steam, 
 and falling all round in showers, has a most 
 beautiful appearance. These geysers now and 
 then throw out very little water, just bubbling 
 up above the ground, and then travellers boil
 
 BOILING SPRINGS, ETC. 55 
 
 eggs and chickens and such things in them, 
 and have a pic-nic near them. It is im- 
 possible to say how long they have lasted, 
 but we know from history that some have 
 been spouting out water for at least 2,000 
 years, and how much longer no one can tell. 
 They may have something to do with vol- 
 canoes, because water may have found its 
 way to the heated interior of the earth, and 
 being converted into steam, expands and 
 causes an eruption. 
 
 Now that we have some idea of the con- 
 struction of the Earth, we must go on to the 
 life of the wonderful plants and creatures 
 Xvhich have peopled it.
 
 56 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 THE DAWN OF LIFE. 
 
 THE first beams of the rising sun, and the 
 first grey light of the morning, tell us of the 
 coming day ; but we cannot even think of 
 the dawn of that far-off day in the Earth's 
 history, when no voice of man or beast was 
 heard, and no trees or grass covered it, with- 
 out solemn wonder at the immense distance 
 that day is from us. A thousand ages are 
 in the sight of the Creator but as yesterday, 
 and the period of man's existence is only 
 a moment compared to that of the lowly 
 creatures which built up this World for him. 
 In the first seas and on the land nothing was 
 heard but the rushing of waters and the roar- 
 ing of the fires of volcanoes. 
 
 It is impossible to be quite certain 
 whether the first living things were animals 
 or plants ; but I think it most likely that 
 very simple plants grew first, and that very
 
 THE DAWN OF LIFE. 57 
 
 simple animals came after or with them. 
 Among the first of these, or perhaps the very 
 first, were some small animals called Eozoon, 
 which means the " life-dawn animal," and 
 with them grew some simple plants. On the 
 banks of the St. Lawrence river in Canada 
 there is a great bed of rock called the 
 Laurentian rocks, made almost entirely of 
 the tiny remains of the " life-dawn animal," 
 which, when we look at them through a micro- 
 scope, are found to possess nearly the same 
 structure as some lowly organized shells 
 living in the seas now. These rocks are 
 found in many parts of the world besides 
 in Eastern America, Bavaria, Scotland, and 
 Norway ; and in some places their thickness 
 has been estimated at thirty thousand feet, or 
 nearly six miles, or one hundred times as 
 thick as St. Paul's Cathedral is high ! These 
 little creatures you see were at work over 
 a great part of the Earth's surface, and you 
 may fancy how many thousands of thousands 
 of years it took them to build up these rocks. 
 The " life-dawn animal " is far older than the 
 chalk-building foraminifera, and so far as we
 
 58 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 know it lived alone in its seas. There were 
 none of the beautiful twisted ammonite shell- 
 fish, nor the shark-like fishes of the chalk 
 seas. The eozoon was the only kind of 
 living creature, the " lord of creation " for the 
 time ; and though storms raged in the seas 
 it inhabited, the water was so deep that it 
 lived on undisturbed. When you are able 
 to use a microscope you will be able to see 
 the traces left by these tiny animals in what 
 is now hard stone. 1 
 
 Life began in a very small way : there 
 were none of the great land animals we 
 have now ; but these seemingly insignificant 
 builders were at work so long that they 
 made the immense rocks I have told you of. 
 But this is not all. About this time some 
 very simple plants grew on the land, and 
 were carried down by the rivers and formed 
 deep beds. After a long time these became 
 covered up with different earths and were 
 turned into the substance called " black-lead," 
 which you use in drawing pencils. But this 
 
 1 Specimen in Table-case 15, Room V., North Gallery 
 British Museum.
 
 THE FIRST PLANT LIFE. 59 
 
 is not really lead ; it is almost pure carbon 
 in fact, the oldest kind of coal so old that it 
 will not now burn like coal, and is entirely 
 made up of fossil plants crushed out of shape, 
 so that we cannot now trace their forms, as 
 we can the plants of the coal. When then 
 you next take up a drawing pencil it will 
 be easy to remember that the black sub- 
 stance which marks the paper was once a 
 living plant, now changed by heat and pres- 
 sure into almost pure carbon. As the name 
 eozoon has been given to the " life-dawn 
 animal," I will give this black-lead the name 
 of Eodendron> or the "dawn-plant." 1 
 
 Two very simple forms of life then 
 occupied the earth and sea at the earliest 
 time when anything at all was living, and 
 strangely enough we use the dead bodies of 
 both of them. We build houses of the rocks 
 the eozoon laid down at the bottom of the 
 sea, and the beautiful art of drawing is car- 
 ried on with the carbon from the first plant 
 life of the world the eodendron. 
 
 1 The name Eophyton has also been suggested for the 
 earliest vegetable forms.
 
 60 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 I must take you away presently to the 
 coal, and sandstone, and chalk, and show you 
 how plants and animals gradually increased 
 in number and size, and fishes began to 
 inhabit the seas, and all living things were 
 slowly going on to greater perfection ; for as 
 time went on there was a steady progress 
 from creatures like the eozoon, which had 
 scarcely any power of moving about, to the 
 active, quarrelsome and greedy things like 
 crabs and lobsters which came after them, 
 and the gigantic ferns of the coal beds. 
 The peaceful " life-dawn animals " drew their 
 food from the vegetable substances dissolved 
 in the waters, though they perhaps also lived 
 on animals still smaller than themselves ; but, 
 by-and-by, creatures, which must have been 
 monsters to them, swarmed in the seas and 
 devouied their smaller companions wholesale ; 
 and in time the Earth became very much the 
 same as it is now, a place where the struggle 
 for life is always going on. It is certain that 
 animals have fed upon one another from the 
 very beginning ; but this is no doubt a wise 
 law of the Creator to prevent them from
 
 ANCIENT FOSSIL PLANTS. 61 
 
 increasing too fast, as they would do if all that 
 were born lived, and none were destroyed. 
 
 We know much less about the vegetation 
 the plants and grasses of the early ages 
 of the world than of the animals ; because 
 plants rot away faster than bones and shells, 
 and, besides, are less likely to be found in 
 places where they would be preserved. A 
 dead tree might be eaten up entirely by 
 insects, as the white ants eat up fallen trees 
 in a short time in tropical countries, and 
 what is left of them crumbles away to fine 
 powder and mixes with the soil. Immense 
 trees are thus devoured now by millions of 
 tiny insects no longer than your thumb nail, 
 in India and Australia. No such thing as a 
 whole and perfect fossil tree with every twig 
 and leaf has been found ; but then the coal 
 beds are really great forests which have been 
 buried for so long a time that they have 
 quite altered in appearance. Still, among 
 these coal beds we often find the bark, fruit, 
 stems, and branches of trees very much like 
 firs, and ferns, and huge club-mosses, which 
 have the same shape they had when living,
 
 62 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 though they are quite black, and burn exactly 
 like coal. 
 
 But there were plants long before the 
 coal forests lived, and many fossil sea weeds 
 are found in the old sandstones and lime- 
 stones in Wales and other places. 1 The Old 
 Red Sandstone, whose position you can see 
 below the coal in the table of succession of 
 formations, page 42, does not give us many 
 fossil plants, though fishes and shells are 
 common. This rock is found in Scotland, 
 Herefordshire, Devonshire, and Ireland, as 
 well as other places, and is often more than 
 2,000 feet thick. It was not all formed in 
 salt water we know, because many of the fossil 
 fishes and shells it contains are fresh water 
 kinds. It must all have been made of the 
 pieces of still older rocks worn away by 
 rivers and settled like a sediment in immense 
 lakes, some of which were fresh water. Then, 
 after the Old Red Sandstone, came a time 
 when the limestones below the coal were 
 laid down at the bottom of a vast sea, and 
 
 1 Divisions A and B of Case r, Room I., North Gallery, 
 contain some of the oldest known fossil plants.
 
 PLANTS OF THE COAL FORESTS. 63 
 
 here the remains of land plants are of course 
 few. Then it seems there must have been 
 a very long time when there were large 
 continents all over the world raised above 
 the seas, but not very much, and on these 
 the forests grew which afterwards became 
 coal fields. Until this time the plants had 
 been mostly water weeds, reeds, rushes, and 
 sea weeds, and it was not until England and 
 Ireland became one continent, as they were 
 once and covered with woods, that the great 
 period of vegetation began. 
 
 The growth of plants was then most 
 wonderful ; but although coal is found in 
 many different parts of the world, it was not 
 all formed at one time, and though it is 
 plentiful in England and Wales, Scotland, 
 Ireland, France, Belgium, Russia, Hungary, 
 Australia, New Zealand, China, and Borneo, 
 it is older in some countries than in others. 
 It is fortunate, however, that this useful 
 material was made in Nature's workshop in 
 so many different countries, or it would have 
 to be carried from one to another. The coal 
 forests were not the same trees as we have
 
 64 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 now oaks, elms, ashes, limes, and so on. 
 Most of them had rather hollow trunks and 
 splendid waving tops like ferns and reeds, 
 though there were some like our fir-trees. 
 
 If you lie down in the long grass before 
 it is mown, and look through the stalks 
 and fancy yourself an inch high only, you 
 will have some idea how the coal forest 
 would have looked if you had lived then. 
 But there were no human beings on the 
 Earth then, and I do not think there were 
 any large animals, at least none have been 
 found in the coal itself, except in Switzer- 
 land, where a few bones of the mammoth 
 (an ancient elephant) and of the rhinoceros 
 have been discovered in the much newer 
 beds of coal, and also those of a large reptile 
 like a crocodile in the coal beds of Ohio 
 in America. 
 
 In such immense forests insects must 
 certainly have been plentiful, and some of 
 the fossil bodies of beetles, dragon-flies, and 
 spiders, have been preserved, and a few tree 
 lizards. 1 Of course the edges of the coal 
 
 1 Fossil insects in Table-case No. 14, Room V.
 
 Calamites. 
 
 Different Kinds of Plants of the Coal Forests.
 
 PLANTS OF THE COAL FORESTS. 67 
 
 forests were washed here and there by the 
 salt sea, and there must have been some fresh 
 water rivers and ponds, for we find both fresh 
 and salt water shells in these beds. It was 
 almost dark in these forests, so thickly 'did the 
 plants grow together. There were enormous 
 club-mosses close together and as high as most 
 houses, with their leaves interlaced making a 
 complete network to shut out the sun. But 
 the sun which shone on the forests was warm, 
 and the air which went through them was soft, 
 or they would not have grown so wonder- 
 fully. Indeed, there can be no doubt that the 
 climate of northern regions was once much 
 warmer than it is now. A thick bed of coal 
 was discovered by the Arctic Expedition 
 in 1875-6 actually within five hundred miles 
 of the North Pole, where the ice on the sea 
 is now thirty or forty feet thick ! 1 The 
 forest which formed this coal could only have 
 grown in a temperate climate, and there are 
 no forests there now ; it is so intensely cold 
 they could not live. There must then have 
 been a great change in the climate of the 
 
 1 In 8i44/ N. latitude. 
 F 2
 
 68 THE VEGETABLE PART, 
 
 Arctic regions since that coal was living ve- 
 getation. The few plants and mosses which 
 can live there now are of a very different 
 and more hardy kind than those of the coal 
 forests! 
 
 If you look at the engraving facing page 64, 
 you will see a drawing of one of the tree 
 ferns with its delicate fronds which grew 
 so abundantly in the coal forests, and there 
 are many other plants, some like the common 
 " mare's tails," or catamites, growing in shallow 
 ponds and ditches now only the " mare's 
 tails " or calamites of the coal forests were as 
 high as poplars. 1 You can imagine what a 
 splendid sight these forests of ferns, club- 
 mosses, and "mare's tails," must have been, 
 and what a multitude of beautiful insects and 
 butterflies' must have flitted about in them ; 
 but their frail bodies have almost all perished, 
 so that we know very little of the animated 
 creatures of the time. 
 
 Besides several sorts of coal both soft and 
 hard there is a substance called " lignite," 
 
 1 Specimens of plants from the coal in Cases No. 2, 3, 4, 
 in Room I.
 
 LIGNITE, JET, AMBER, AND PEAT. 69 
 
 which is scarcely wood and scarcely coal, of a 
 brown colour. In fact, lignite is wood almost 
 turned to coal, and it has helped us to learn 
 that coal was once living wood ; but it is not 
 nearly so old as the coal. Then again there 
 is the beautiful substance called "jet" used for 
 making bracelets. This is a kind of fossil 
 gum or pitch dropped from the trees while 
 they were growing, and, though different in 
 colour, it is much the same in kind as amber. 
 Amber is often found with flies, spiders, and 
 small leaves imbedded in it. When this fossil 
 resin or gum was flowing out of the ancient 
 pine-trees, and was quite sticky, flies settled 
 upon it and became entangled in it, and as 
 more of the gum flowed out they became 
 quite covered. Then the gum dropped from 
 the tree and hardened, and it is now found in 
 lumps on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and in 
 beds of sand and clay with fossil wood. It is 
 of a beautiful bright yellow colour, and beads 
 for necklaces and other ornaments are made 
 out of it. 
 
 If we arrange the things we have been 
 talking about in order, the oldest first, they
 
 70 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 would come thus : plumbago or black-lead 
 or, as I have called it, eodendron, " the life- 
 dawn plant "-first, then hard coal, then soft 
 coal, then lignite and jet, then bog oak and 
 peat. But I must tell you something about 
 bog oak and peat. In many of the swamps 
 and bogs of the World the trunks of dead 
 trees are found, which have become quite 
 black and almost like lignite, because they 
 have been buried so long. Thus, in the bogs 
 of Ireland oak trees are often found, and they 
 were most likely living when the reindeer in- 
 habited Ireland. This old bogwood is made 
 into beads for necklaces and other ornaments. 
 Peat is a partly decayed vegetable substance, 
 with beautiful little plants growing on its sur- 
 face, and is really coal in its infancy. It is found 
 all over the world more or less in wet places, 
 and consists of the roots and stems of mosses 
 and reeds, some of which are like the gigantic 
 plants of the coal period, but very small in 
 comparison. I have no doubt that in time 
 some of these peat bogs may be turned into 
 coal if they sink down and become covered 
 with other earths, but at present they are all
 
 ANIMALS OF THE COAL PERIOD. 71 
 
 on the surface and so soft that they are dan- 
 gerous to walk upon because one may sink 
 in and be smothered. 
 
 This, as far as we can trace it, is a sketch 
 of the history of vegetable life on our Earth. 
 We will go back to the coal for a moment and 
 see what the animal life of that time was. 
 The seas of the time of the coal forests were 
 sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, and in 
 the limestone rocks of the oceans which 
 separated the great continents of that time 
 there is a record of the inhabitants of the 
 seas. The land plants were of more than 
 1,000 different kinds, and there were more 
 than 200 kinds of fishes in the waters, and 
 corals, shells, and small crab-like animals in- 
 numerable. The fishes were fellows with 
 terrible teeth, and their bodies were covered 
 with strong hard scales. One of these fish 
 was thirty feet long, and there were others 
 of considerable size. It is curious that the 
 fishes of this time remind one of reptiles 
 (lizards and crocodiles), just as the birds of 
 a future time seem to have something of the 
 reptile about them, as you will see by-and-by.
 
 72 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 I dare say you have remarked while 
 reading that all the plants and animals of the 
 early ages of the world seem to be made on 
 a simple plan, and as the Earth grows older 
 they become more perfect, and this is just 
 what I want you to take notice of all through. 
 The plants of the coal period, you have seen, 
 were nothing like so perfect in construction, 
 beautiful as they were, as the forest trees of 
 the present time, neither were the animals 
 so perfect as those living now. There has 
 been progress, step by step, throughout the 
 vegetable and animal creation ; and, though 
 many of the lower forms of the early ages 
 exist now, there are others far superior to 
 them which did not exist then : but all this 
 will come in "The Animal Part." 
 
 About the middle of the Earth's age came 
 the wonderful period of vegetation which 
 gave us our coal, and after that there was a 
 great and busy time, when huge reptiles and 
 reptile-like birds, and then true birds, made 
 their appearance. But that belongs to the 
 next part of the "puzzle of life." 
 
 If we look with astonishment at the coal
 
 COAL IS FOSSIL WOOD. 73 
 
 forests, we may also well think of them with 
 thankfulness. Here is the sunshine of past 
 ages stored up for our use, and we bring it 
 out again to warm ourselves, cook our food, 
 make all our iron things, and drive our steam- 
 engines ! Can any romance be finer than 
 this, that we are carried across to America 
 and India and Australia in steam-boats driven 
 by the "fossil sunlight" of ages and ages past, 
 and whirled along at sixty miles an hour over 
 iron rails by the same stored-up strength ? 
 
 If you doubt this, think of living trees. Do 
 they not live by the air and sunlight ? Will 
 they grow without these ? They spread 
 their branches and leaves to gather the 
 warmth and light from the air, and when 
 they are cut down and dried, and you put a 
 match to the wood, all the old warmth and 
 light come out again ; and we know that 
 the coal is only fossil wood. Our Creator 
 wastes nothing. Even when there were no 
 people living to rejoice in the sun, He 
 thought of those people who should come in 
 time, and not one of the fiery rays of the 
 fierce sun was lost. These mighty forests
 
 74 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 were sent to gather it, and when they had 
 died down they sank below the surface and 
 were covered from the air, that none of their 
 light or heat should escape. 
 
 In such forests it is strange that there 
 were no birds, especially as there were swarms 
 of insects, and no doubt abundance of worms. 
 But no bone of bird or any trace of feathered 
 songster of these lovely groves has yet been 
 found. Little lizards chased flies and beetles 
 up and down the stems of the club-mosses and 
 ferns, and larger reptiles lurked in the long 
 damp grass under the shade. The pools and 
 ponds were filled with curious fishes, and 
 reefs of beautiful white coral fringed all the 
 shores of the seas. 
 
 But the Earth was not fit for the habitation 
 of man. The fruits of the trees were not such 
 as he could have eaten, and their wood was 
 not hard enough to build houses of. Still it 
 was being got ready for him, and not a leaf 
 waved uselessly in the bright, warm air, and 
 not a tree fell to the ground, but it was to be 
 turned into coal, and to come forth again one 
 day a hard black lump, without any of its 
 former beauty, but to give back the light and
 
 THE EARTH NOT YET FIT FOR MAN. 75 
 
 heat it had gathered from the sun ages and 
 ages ago. 
 
 Many periods in the Earth's history have 
 passed since the coal period, and in every 
 one of these the trees have been increasing 
 in perfection, though there have never since 
 been such great numbers of a few kinds 
 growing. When we come to the more lately 
 formed beds of earth we begin to find the 
 cypress, willow, ash, oak, elm, and other 
 forest trees which are living now. The 
 trunks of these trees, blackened by age, lie 
 buried in peat bogs and swamps all over 
 Europe. The mighty Mississippi river brings 
 down immense quantities of dead trees, and 
 as these sink to the bottom near its mouth 
 they are forming future coal beds. Along 
 the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, too, and 
 stretching far away under the German 
 Ocean, is an old English forest. In some 
 places the trunks of the buried trees may 
 be seen standing upright just where they 
 grew. The nets of the fishermen are con- 
 tinually bringing up pieces of wood, roots, 
 and seeds ; and when the sea washes away 
 the soft cliffs here the bones, teeth, and tusks
 
 76 THE VEGETABLE PART. 
 
 of the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, 
 and other large animals which inhabited this 
 forest, may be seen in great numbers. 
 
 Down below the waves of ocean have 
 these woods sunk with all their once living 
 creatures, and though you may suppose that 
 it must have been very long ago that they 
 grew, they are of the same kind as those 
 which now make the hills and valleys of 
 England beautiful. 
 
 Sometimes a forest must sink very fast, 
 for travellers have told us how they have 
 sailed on rivers and lakes over the tops of 
 sunken trees, and, looking down into the 
 clear water, have seen the branches waving 
 below tall trees standing upright at the 
 bottom, and the boats sailing over their tops ! 
 
 We must now pass on to the living crea- 
 tures which peopled the Earth, and their 
 story can be told with more certainty than 
 that of the perishable plants which clothed 
 the surface of the ground, and, while they 
 rendered it beautiful, also served as food and 
 shelter for innumerable animals, and have 
 become so useful to us as coal, lignite, black- 
 lead, and other productions of ancient forests.
 
 THE ANIMAL PART. 77 
 
 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 WE must now go back and collect the 
 smaller pieces of "the puzzle" which make 
 up the animal part. The great periods of 
 vegetation ended in our country with the coal 
 forests, and there has been no such wonder- 
 ful growth of plants since the time when the 
 New Red Sandstone, lying above the coal, 
 was formed ; though no doubt trees and plants 
 have since flourished, as they do now on the 
 Earth, but not in such quantities as during 
 the coal period. 
 
 We remember that the eozoon, " the life- 
 dawn animal," is the oldest animal we know 
 of, and that it lived so long ago as when the 
 Laurentian rocks were laid down at the 
 bottom of the seas of that time ; then in 
 later rocks we find the burrows of sea worms 
 in the stone, and later still simple shells 
 with two valves like the common mussel, and
 
 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 other animals of a simple kind, like the corals, 
 sponges, and star-fishes which exist now. 
 There must have been millions of these 
 creatures in the older limestone seas, for the 
 rocks are almost entirely composed of their 
 fossil shells and bodies. By-and-by a rather 
 superior animal inhabited the seas of Wales, 
 called a trilobite, of which you will see a 
 picture on the opposite page. This curious 
 animal was of the same family as the shrimps 
 and prawns, but much larger, and he must 
 have been a giant among the others. None 
 of these animals had any bones, you must 
 understand ; but they had a hard shelly 
 covering to support their soft bodies inside, 
 and no doubt the trilobites were able to swim 
 about very fast. 1 
 
 What I want you to take notice of now is 
 the progress that has been going on from the 
 almost motionless eozoon to the shell-fish 
 and star-fish, which could crawl along the 
 bottom of the sea and over the rocks, to this 
 active, quick-moving trilobite, with his great 
 paddles. Then the next step is a very great 
 
 1 Numerous specimens in Case No. 7, Room V.
 
 TRILO BITES AND FISHES. 
 
 79 
 
 III. 
 
 Trilobite.
 
 THE AGE OF REPTILES. 81 
 
 one, when we come to animals with bones. 
 The first of these are fishes. All the other 
 bones are joined to the backbone, therefore 
 all animals with bones are called vertebrata, 
 which is a Latin word meaning having a 
 backbone with joints. Now animals with 
 bones are plainly superior to those with only 
 shells, and when we find fishes among the 
 rocks of Wales and Devonshire we know 
 that we are beginning to pick up some 
 important pieces of the "puzzle of life." 
 These fishes were most of them related to 
 the sturgeon, and their bones and teeth are 
 found in great quantities in the Old Red 
 Sandstone rocks, just below the coal. 1 
 
 It is not until we get above the coal into 
 the oolite or egg-stone rocks that still larger 
 and altogether superior animals, both of sea 
 and land, began to increase, and this is called 
 
 THE AGE OF REPTILES. 
 
 This has been called the reptile age be- 
 cause there were such numbers of animals 
 
 1 Specimens of fossil fishes from various rocks in Wall- 
 case No. I, Room II. 
 
 G
 
 82 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 like crocodiles, lizards, and tortoises (which 
 are all reptiles), and some of them were of 
 immense size. For instance, there was a huge 
 creature something like a frog, but as large 
 as a Shetland pony, called the Labyrinthodon, 
 with a great many curious teeth, and this 
 animal has left footprints in the New Red 
 Sandstone which have been dried and buried, 
 we can't tell how long, and there are the 
 cracks made by the sun drying the place he 
 walked over when that was soft earth. 
 There is a drawing of some of these footsteps 
 in the picture on the next page, and there 
 are also the footprints of a large bird, and 
 you can see where he walked over the soft 
 earth and made a long line of footmarks ; and 
 if you look at the footprints of birds on the 
 snow or mud now you will notice marks just 
 like these. Then there is another picture of 
 a single footprint of a large bird, and all those 
 round dots are where rain drops fell and left 
 their marks in the soft earth. 
 
 I dare say you will wonder how it is that 
 these footprints have not disappeared. Well, 
 when the animals and birds that made them
 
 FOSSIL FOOTPRINTS. 
 
 Footprints of Labyrinthodon. 
 
 Footprints of Birds, (2) with marks of Rain-drops. 
 G 2
 
 FISH-LIZARDS AND BIRD-REPTILES. 85 
 
 had gone the marks became filled with dry 
 sand, no doubt blown in by the wind, and 
 then the mud dried hard, and at last it became 
 covered with other earths and sank slowly 
 down, just as the coal forests had done before, 
 and remained there until we dug it up with 
 these tracks of the birds and animals that 
 lived then. Some of these birds must have 
 been larger than any living now, because their 
 footmarks are so long. None of their bones 
 have been found yet, I believe, but plenty of 
 the teeth and some bones of the labyrin- 
 thodon have. The real footmarks, of course, 
 are very large, though they are small in the 
 picture. 1 
 
 In the great beds of Lias there are many 
 other strange animals, and among them are 
 two great fish-lizards called the Ichthyosaurus 
 and Plesiosaiirus. Both of these lived in the 
 water and perhaps came on land sometimes, 
 and it is certain that they must have been very 
 ferocious creatures, from their great size and 
 sharp teeth. The plesiosaurus would be able 
 
 1 See examples in the large Wall-cases in Rooms I., II., 
 and III., North Gallery.
 
 86 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 to raise his long neck above the water and 
 snap at some of those curious birds rather 
 like bats which lived at the time, and of 
 which I shall have something to say presently. 
 Some of these fish-lizards were as large as 
 whales, and their bodies have been so beauti- 
 fully preserved in the limestone rocks that we 
 can actually sometimes find in their stomachs 
 the food they lived on. 
 
 Now we have got to a higher order of 
 creation still, these fish-lizards, and they re- 
 mind one of the next step in progress birds. 
 You know that all birds lay eggs, so do 
 almost all reptiles, such as crocodiles, lizards, 
 and most snakes, so that they are alike in 
 this. Then the plesiosaurus with his long 
 neck reminds us of such birds as the heron 
 and the swan, but he is altogether more like 
 a reptile than either a fish or a bird. There 
 were also huge land reptiles, which lived in 
 the forests of the time, and must have been a 
 terror to the smaller animals. From the bones 
 of one of these which have been found in the 
 oolite clays near Weymouth in Dorsetshire 
 (the Cetiosaurus)> we see that it must have
 
 ICHTHYOSAURUS AND PLESIOSAURUS. 87
 
 THE EARLIEST BIRD FORMS. 89 
 
 been nearly as large as an elephant, and 
 there are others called the Megalosaurus, 
 Dinosaurus, &c. All these names end with 
 sauriis, a name taken from the Greek word 
 meaning lizard ; and you will see now why the 
 oolite, or "Jurassic" 1 age, as it is sometimes 
 called, is well named the " reptile age," for 
 these creatures swarmed on the land and in 
 the sea. Specimens of these you can see for 
 yourselves in the cases on the walls of the 
 third room in the North Gallery of the British 
 Museum, where all the fossils are collected. 
 
 But still more extraordinary animals 
 than any of these lived at the time, and we 
 can scarcely tell whether they were birds or 
 reptiles, as they were something like both, 
 but I suppose we must call them flying rep- 
 tiles, and they are the nearest approach to 
 birds that had yet existed. These creatures 
 are called Pterodactyles, from two Greek words 
 which mean "wing-fingered." Suppose the 
 little fingers of both your hands were a yard 
 longer than the others, and suppose a thick 
 
 1 So called because the mountain chain of the Jura Alps 
 was raised during this period.
 
 yo THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 leathery skin was stretched from the tips of 
 your long little fingers to each of your feet, 
 you would have wings something like a 
 pterodactyl and also something like the 
 wings of a bat. But the pterodactyl had a 
 long neck and a long beak-like mouth, full 
 of long sharp pointed teeth. It could not 
 walk much I think, but it could hang itself 
 up by its hind limbs to a tree or rock, head 
 downwards like a bat, and must have been 
 able to fly very strongly, with its huge 
 leathery wings, but it had no feathers. 
 There were swarms of these curious half 
 lizard half bird-like animals on the land, and 
 they were of all sizes, some no bigger than 
 a crow, and some as large as the albatross, 
 measuring twelve feet across their out- 
 stretched wings. Their skeletons are some 
 of the commonest fossils in the oolite rocks, 
 all through the great reptile age. 1 
 
 Now you see we have come to a reptile 
 that can fly, but, excepting for its wings and 
 some of its bones, more like a crocodile than 
 
 1 Several specimens in Room III., and in Table-case 
 No. 1 6, Room IV.
 
 BIRD-REPTILES. 91 
 
 a bird. A little further on we find another 
 curious animal in the oolite rocks, which is 
 much more like a true bird than the ptero- 
 dactyl, because it had feathered wings. It is 
 called the Archceopteryx, which means "an- 
 cient wing," and I have given a picture of it 
 on the same page as the pterodactyl, so that 
 you may compare them together. The blade- 
 bone and " merry-thought " of this creature 
 were exactly like those of a bird, and so 
 were the feet and legs, which would enable 
 it to walk easily, or perch on the branch of 
 a tree, but the tail was long and many- 
 jointed like that of a lizard, with a fan of 
 feathers growing on each side of it, and 
 short feathered wings. Then it most likely 
 had teeth like a lizard, and there were short 
 claws at the bend of the wings. This bird- 
 reptile was about the size of a crow, and was 
 the first we know of with feathers, and the 
 limestone rock has preserved it most beauti- 
 fully through all the long ages which have 
 passed since it flitted over the land of the 
 oolite period. 1 Later still than these, there 
 
 1 Wall-case No. n in Room III., several specimens, 
 mperfect.
 
 92 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 lived in America, about the time the chalk was 
 formed in England, two strange birds called 
 Hesperornis and Ichthyornis, both of which 
 had teeth in the jaws. The former was an 
 immense fellow like the penguin, with short 
 wings, and the latter was about the size of a 
 pigeon with large feathered wings. 
 
 They are finding more of these curious 
 creatures every now and then in America. 
 Some are without teeth, and have a horny 
 bill like that of a real bird, and in other ways 
 more nearly resemble living birds ; still they 
 have not lost the appearance of reptiles in 
 their principal bones. 
 
 I have been particular in describing some 
 of these fish-lizards and bird- reptiles ; because 
 they, or their near relations, were the princi- 
 pal inhabitants of land and sea from the end 
 of the coal period to the end of the chalk, 
 though there were of course swarms of fishes 
 and shell-fish ; but I ought to tell you that 
 even so early as this there was at least one 
 animal known which suckled its young ones, 
 and this was a small insect- eating creature 
 not larger than a rat, of the same family
 
 ARCHJLOPTERYX AND PTERODACTYL. 93 
 
 Pterodactyl ( Wing-finger). 
 
 Archaopteryx (Ancient-wing).
 
 THE CHALK PERIOD. 95 
 
 (called Marsupial] as the kangaroo of 
 Australia, which carries its young ones in 
 a pocket or pouch in its skin. 
 
 All this time we have been hunting for 
 parts of " the puzzle " in those ancient oolite 
 rocks between the coal and the chalk, and 
 those we have found are very important. 
 We have seen the slow progress from simple 
 sea shells to simple fishes, and then onwards 
 to fish-lizards and bird-reptiles with one 
 little marsupial animal, of a far higher kind, 
 in between, as if to tell us beforehand what 
 more complete and perfect animals we might 
 expect by-and-by. After the fishes we have 
 found fish-lizards, then bird-reptiles with 
 wings, but no feathers, and later still a bird- 
 reptile with wing and tail feathers. How 
 different the life of the Earth was at the end 
 of the " reptile age " of the oolite rocks, to 
 the far back Laurentian time when one 
 little creature, our old friend eozoon, alone 
 held possession of the seas ! 
 
 THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD. 
 
 Now let us look into the rocks next 
 above, and see what is to be found there.
 
 96 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 We have arrived in the Cretaceous period, 
 or time when the chalk was formed. 1 You 
 remember I told you you might call this 
 " foraminifera earth " because so much of 
 it was made up of the shells of these tiny 
 animals, thousands of which could be put into 
 a thimble. Whenever you make a mark with 
 a piece of drawing chalk you rub off a number 
 of them, and you will see what pretty little 
 creatures they were if you look at the drawings 
 of some of them on the next page as they are 
 seen under the microscope, magnified thou- 
 sands of times their natural size ; but there 
 are others of different shapes. On the same 
 page too there is a handsome shell, called an 
 ammonite, and of its real size, common in 
 chalk rocks. The seas of the time must have 
 been very deep as I have explained before, 
 and the chalk contains numbers of bones of 
 fishes everywhere, and many of the remains 
 of the reptile-like creatures of the time before. 
 Corals, sea-urchins, crabs, &c., abounded, and 
 as you can scarcely ever see chalk without 
 immense flint stones in it, you may suppose 
 
 1 From the Latin word " creta," meaning chalk.
 
 THE CHALK PERIOD. 
 
 97 
 
 VII. 
 
 FOSSILS OF THE CHALK. 
 
 i Ammonite. 234 Foraminifera (Chalk-builders). 
 
 \\
 
 FOSSILS OF THE CHALK. 99 
 
 what millions of sponges lived on the rocks, 
 for these flints are partly made up of their 
 fossil bodies. 1 Another Cretaceous period is 
 beginning now at the bottom of the Atlantic 
 and Pacific Oceans, where it is deep enough 
 to cover the Alps, for these little foraminifera 
 are living on the surface in countless millions, 
 and day by day their fossil shells are settling 
 down to the bottom and forming a soft grey 
 mud, full of the carbonate of lime like chalk. 
 The climate of the Cretaceous age was mild 
 and pleasant, as we know from the kind of 
 animals in the seas. Slowly the water began 
 to get shallower and shallower by the up- 
 heaval of the bed, and at last the bottom of 
 this mighty chalk ocean came up to the light 
 and sun, to be covered in some places with the 
 drift and worn particles of older rocks swept 
 over it by rivers, and to receive new plants and 
 new animals, and in some places to remain 
 almost bare, as it is on the downs of Brighton. 
 Now we take one more step upwards into 
 
 1 Ammonites in the Table-cases in Rooms V. and VI. 
 For enlarged models of foraminifera, see Case No. 15 in 
 Room V. 
 
 H 2
 
 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 almost a new world the world on which 
 mighty animals lived, and which man came 
 to share with them. 
 
 THE TERTIARY PERIOD. 
 
 The reign of the reptiles is now passed. 
 The ichthyosaurus and pterodactyl no longer 
 inhabited the seas and continents. Great 
 changes had taken place in the shape of the 
 land. A river larger than the Rhine swept 
 majestically through England from the bor- 
 ders of Wales right out into the German 
 Ocean, and its banks were covered with forests 
 and marshes, where the new animals which 
 had come to take possession of the earth 
 lived and moved and had their being. The 
 mountains of the Pyrenees were raised above 
 the sea, and parts of Surrey and Sussex 
 appeared too. It was most likely in the 
 early part of the Tertiary period that the 
 stone was formed of which almost all Paris 
 is built. Fancy a great city built of the shells 
 of dead animals ! One can scarcely believe it-: 
 but the microscope lets us into this secret of 
 Nature. If we take a piece of this stone and
 
 GIGANTIC ANIMALS. 
 
 examine it in a powerful microscope we see 
 that it is made almost entirely of tiny shells, 
 so small that myriads of them could be 
 packed in a nut-shell. How long must they 
 have been working to make all the stone beds 
 of which Paris is built ? We cannot measure 
 the time, we can only know it must have 
 been enormous ! 
 
 All kinds of animals both of sea and land 
 increased in numbers and perfection. The 
 ammonites were dead, but their even more 
 beautiful relation, the nautilus, was living as 
 it is now. The trilobite was gone, but his 
 next relation, the lobster and crab, appeared. 
 Fishes abounded. Whales which suckle their 
 young ones appeared, and the numbers of ver- 
 tebrata, or animals with backbones, were more 
 numerous than they had ever been before. 
 Just as animals with bones are more perfect 
 than those with only skins or shells, so animals 
 which suckle their young ones are more perfect 
 than those which only lay eggs. Thus the 
 whale is a more perfect animal than the shark, 
 though both inhabit the water ; and elephants 
 and even rats and mice more perfect still ; and
 
 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 because there were so many of these "sticklers," 
 or mammalia as they are called, in the Tertiary 
 period, we know that all living creatures were 
 becoming more perfect. It will interest you 
 too to learn that monkeys began to appear 
 now, and that they were common in France, 
 while at the present time the only part of 
 Europe where they are to be found is on the 
 rock of Gibraltar. 
 
 But I want particularly to tell you of the 
 giant animals the Mammoth, Mastodon, 
 Megatherium, Dinotherium, and others, and 
 first let us see what the mammoth was like. 
 
 In former times, when people accidentally 
 found the bones of these animals, they actually 
 thought they had belonged to giant men,, and 
 we can scarcely wonder at that : but we know 
 better. If only one small bone is shown to 
 Professor Owen or Professor Huxley, he can 
 tell at once whether it belonged to a man or 
 an animal, a fish or a bird, and very often 
 the particular animal too. Well, the bones of 
 the mammoth were found in the north of 
 Russia on the banks of the river Lena in 
 1 800 : but the Russians knew of them before
 
 THE MAMMOTH AND MASTODON. 103 
 
 that, and the name they gave the animal 
 means " earth," because they supposed it 
 burrowed in the earth like a mole. This one 
 is now in the Museum at St. Petersburg, and 
 its brownish coat and long black hairs, and 
 even the hoofs and some of the flesh, can be 
 distinctly seen. The drawing in the frontis- 
 piece is taken from it. It was strange that 
 any people could have supposed that this 
 huge creature, larger than an elephant and 
 with great curved tusks ten feet long and 
 weighing 160 Ibs., could have got under- 
 ground of its own accord : but that was the 
 only way in which they could account for 
 finding it buried in the earth on the banks of 
 the rivers. Look at the picture in the frontis- 
 piece ; what a splendid animal he was, this old 
 elephant ; larger and stronger than any living 
 elephants ! Immense quantities of their bones 
 are found in Siberia, and the tusks and teeth 
 are brought in ship-loads to England, where 
 they are sold for their ivory. Their skeletons 
 have been found in most countries of Europe, 
 in many parts of Asia, and in North America, 
 and these animals must have been common
 
 104 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 at one time near London, for their bones have 
 been dug up in the brick earth at Ilford in 
 Essex and other places near the Thames. 
 There is a skull with tusks set up with iron 
 supports in the British Museum. 1 
 
 There was besides another animal very 
 much like this called the Mastodon ; but it had 
 tusks in the lower jaws as well as the upper, 
 four in all, and the lower tusks dropped out 
 when the animal grew old. The whole 
 skeleton of one of these is also put up in the 
 Museum, which you ought to go and see.' 2 
 Mastodons' bones have been discovered in 
 England and other parts of Europe, and in 
 North and South America and India, so that 
 they were spread pretty well all over the world. 
 They had very curious pointed teeth rather 
 like a lot of fir cones piled together, not flat 
 grinders like those of the mammoth and all 
 living elephants, and perhaps they fed upon 
 fruits and nuts, and boughs, as I do not think 
 they could have managed well to chew grass 
 and leaves with such pointed teeth. The 
 teeth in their old dead jaws are still beauti- 
 
 1 Room VI., North Gallery. 2 In the same room,
 
 THE ENGLISH LION. 105 
 
 fully white and look like china. Both the 
 mammoth and the mastodon had long trunks 
 of course, and they must have been grand look- 
 ing creatures marching about in the English 
 forests. We should be very much startled if 
 we were to meet one of them now in an Eng- 
 lish wood : but there is no chance of that, 
 they have all passed away, and the only 
 relations they have living are the elephants of 
 Africa and Asia. 
 
 During this Tertiary period, or at least 
 the early part of it, besides the mammoth and 
 mastodon, the hippopotamus and rhinoceros 
 were plentiful about the Thames. Those 
 same Ilford marshes in Essex have been a 
 complete storehouse of the remains of these 
 animals. The bones of a hundred different 
 mammoths and eighty rhinoceroses have been 
 dug up lately from the damp, black soil, as 
 well as many belonging to the hippopotamus, 
 and we can have no doubt that all the 
 swamps along the north side of the river 
 were inhabited by large herds of these huge 
 beasts, or so many of their skeletons could 
 not have been collected in one place. It is
 
 106 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 very likely they were overtaken in a flood of 
 the river and drowned, and their bodies sank 
 down in the mud of the river bank : but any- 
 how, there they are to tell us that they 
 lived and died almost within sight of the 
 Tower of London, if it had been built then, 
 as of course it was not. 
 
 Long long ago too, before there was a 
 single brick where London stands, and when 
 the few human beings who were living were 
 obliged to hide themselves in caves, great 
 lions might have been heard roaring at night 
 in the forests of the Thames Valley. The 
 bones of this lion have been found in many 
 different parts of England, and a terrible 
 fellow he must have been, for some of his 
 canine teeth (the long sharp teeth in cats and 
 dogs) were more than six inches long. Indeed 
 they were like small swords, and this is why 
 he has been called the " sabre-toothed " lion. 
 There were also bears, like the great grisly 
 bear of America, and leopards, hyenas, and 
 wolves, and besides two kinds of ox far larger 
 than those we have now. But one of the 
 handsomest animals was the great Irish stag.
 
 VIII.
 
 THE GREAT IRISH STAG. 109 
 
 When standing upright the top of his horns 
 would be as high as two tall men. He was 
 indeed a fine fellow with his immense spread- 
 ing antlers. The deer in our parks would 
 look dwarfs beside him. He inhabited both 
 England and Ireland : but, being found more 
 often in Ireland, he has got the name of the 
 Irish stag. As many as thirty of the 
 skeletons of these stags have been found to- 
 gether under a bog in Ireland, and in some of 
 the bones the marrow is still preserved, and 
 they burn well. Fences have been made of 
 these bones in Ireland, and when the people 
 of a small village .in the county of Antrim 
 heard of the battle of Waterloo they made a 
 great bonfire of the bones and horns of the 
 Irish stag to rejoice over the victory. I dare 
 say these stags were hunted by wolves, and 
 perhaps driven on to the ice of ancient lakes, 
 where they broke through and got drowned, 
 for so many of their skeletons are found to- 
 gether. I could not pass this magnificent stag 
 by without giving you a picture of him. 1 He 
 
 1 Complete specimens of male and female in the middle 
 of Room V.
 
 i io THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 was a much nobler looking animal than the 
 reindeer, which lived along with him at the time 
 in England, and from his appearance I should 
 say he was a swift runner and great fighter. 
 Some antlers have been found locked together, 
 just as these stags died in mortal combat, and 
 I never see Sir Edwin Landseer's beautiful 
 picture of two red- deer stags fighting without 
 thinking what a grand sight it would have been 
 to see two of these great Irish stags rushing 
 at each other with their powerful horns. 
 
 Not one of those animals is living now, 
 and none of them is mentioned in any history 
 or tradition whatever, and though there is no 
 doubt that men living in Europe saw the 
 mammoth alive (as you will find in the next 
 chapter), they knew of no kind of writing in 
 which to tell us of them ; these fossils are 
 the only records left, but they speak plainly 
 enough of the time when England and the 
 whole of Europe were inhabited by these 
 races of huge animals. 
 
 Now I must carry you away to South 
 America, where there are more wonders. If 
 I were to tell you of all the singular monsters
 
 THE MEGATHERIUM. 113 
 
 people have found in the beds of the rivers 
 there it would make a book of itself. You 
 know what large rivers there are in that 
 country, and how they run for thousands of 
 miles through almost flat plains called 
 " Pampas." Well, these rivers have often 
 changed their beds by cutting new channels 
 in the soft soil. The old dry beds of the 
 rivers are the burying-places of some most 
 curious animals, but I have not room to tell 
 you about more than one of them at present. 
 He is called the Megatherium, which means 
 " great beast." His size and strength were 
 enormous. The largest hippopotamus looks 
 small by his side. His leg bones are bigger 
 than your body. He was more like the 
 sloth than any other living animal, but he 
 could not climb. He stood on those huge, 
 broad hind feet, with his strong tail as a sort 
 of third leg, and tore down the branches of 
 the trees to feed on, or even rooted them up 
 to get at the leaves. Standing by his skeleton 
 in the British Museum 1 one feels quite a 
 shrimp, and he looks strong enough to walk 
 
 1 Room VI. 
 
 i
 
 Ii 4 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 away comfortably with an elephant on his 
 back. 
 
 Another immense animal inhabited South 
 America at the time, which geologists have 
 called Dinotherium, or "dreadful beast." 1 He 
 was a relation of the mastodon, but his tusks 
 were very curious. Instead of being in the 
 upper jaw and turned upwards they stuck out 
 from the lower jaw and curved downwards, 
 giving him a very odd appearance. He most 
 probably had a trunk like the mammoth or 
 mastodon, but perhaps not so long. All these 
 of course were vegetable feeders. 
 
 The Tertiary period is so remarkable for 
 the numbers of animals more or less related 
 to elephants and spread all over the world, 
 that we might almost call it the " elephant 
 age," as the oolite has been named the " reptile 
 age." These elephantine animals abounded 
 in Europe, Asia, and North and South 
 America, and though none of this kind have 
 yet been found in Australia and Africa, I 
 cannot help thinking they will be discovered 
 in Africa at all events, for there is no doubt 
 that Africa and Europe were once joined. 
 
 1 Head and tusks in Wall-case No. 2, Room VI.
 
 GIGANTIC BIRDS. 115 
 
 Australia you know possesses that animal 
 so unlike all others that when we first see it 
 we are quite astonished the kangaroo. The 
 bones of a huge fossil kangaroo have been 
 found in Australia which must have stood 
 fourteen or fifteen feet high I should think 
 when on its hind legs, or more than twice as. 
 large as any living now. 1 Then there were 
 giant birds in New Zealand (something like 
 the ostrich) called dinornis or " dreadful bird." 
 These fellows had no wings, and they must 
 have been very much taller than the ostrich 
 or emu. To look at their leg bones you 
 would think they were the bones of oxen 
 instead of birds, they are so immensely thick 
 and strong. I do not think any of these are 
 living now, because they have been sought 
 for carefully, and none of the natives even 
 can say that they have seen one. But their 
 skeletons are common in the surface earth, 
 and their bones, cracked to get the marrow 
 out of them, are often dug out of the heaps 
 of refuse collected about ancient cooking- 
 
 o 
 
 places. So that they were used for food, and 
 
 1 Skull in Wall-case No. I, Room VI. 
 
 I 2
 
 u6 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 perhaps they have not been extinct that is 
 to say, died out more than a few hundred 
 years ; and this is more likely because feathers 
 are sometimes attached to the remains, and 
 undecayed sinews on the feet. A human skele- 
 ton has been found in a grave in New Zealand, 
 too, with the egg of one between its arms, and 
 little piles of pebbles are often seen among 
 their bones, where the stomach would be, which 
 the bird swallowed to digest its food, just as 
 many birds do now. The natives called it the 
 Moa, and they have some traditions about it, 
 and, all things considered, it is probably one 
 of the most recent fossil animals, and that is 
 the reason why I have left it to the last. 1 
 
 Now I dare say you will wish to know 
 when the animals living now took the place 
 of those I have described, and which have all 
 passed away. This cannot be told with cer- 
 tainty, but you will see in the " Human Part " 
 that Men were living when the mammoth, 
 mastodon, and some other extinct animals, in- 
 habited the Earth, and that the reindeer, ox, 
 bear, wolf, hyena, &c., have survived to the 
 present day. 
 
 1 Several specimens in Wall-case No. n, Room III.
 
 THE PLAN OF CREATION. 117 
 
 Throughout these immense periods of 
 time there are gaps which we cannot yet 
 fill up. No one can yet say, for instance, 
 when the last of the mammoths disappeared, 
 and the first of their near relations, the In- 
 dian and African elephants, took their place. 
 These are the missing parts of " the puzzle 
 of life " which you may perhaps one of these 
 days find when you come to study the subject, 
 and when you have learned all that is known 
 at present. But you may be sure of this, that 
 throughout all time there has been progress^ 
 the lower forms of animal life have been fol- 
 lowed by more perfect forms as the Earth 
 grew older. It is true the lower forms of 
 life have not all died out. These imperfect 
 animals have run through all the ages the 
 chalk builder of the Cretaceous age lives in 
 the ocean now and there are many other 
 simple animals which lived in Old Red Sand- 
 stone times, and are not extinct yet, but 
 wherever a superior kind of animal has passed 
 away another more perfect has taken its place. 
 This will be seen at once if we compare the 
 " Reptile Age " with the Tertiary. The great 
 ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and pterodactyl
 
 Il8 THE ANIMAL PART. 
 
 are gone, but now we have the more perfect 
 crocodiles and birds. The mammoth is gone, 
 but we have the elephant. There are no 
 giant mosses or towering tree ferns, but our 
 forest trees are more perfect and more varied. 
 The plants which formed the coal forests and 
 once clothed the Earth with beauty have 
 dwindled away to the lowly forms which we 
 must stoop to examine in swamps, and these 
 humble plants are all the surviving relatives 
 of their once noble family. The lordly oaks, 
 and elms, stronger, and even more lovely in 
 the sweet drapery of their foliage, and much 
 better fitted for our use, have succeeded all 
 those soft-stemmed plants which grew so fast 
 and were the best possible kind for forming 
 coal. 
 
 When you are able to study what is called 
 comparative anatomy you will see how wonder- 
 ful the plan of creation is, and how beautifully 
 it has been worked out by its great Designer. 
 You will see in the bones of the reptiles of the 
 oolite rocks a prophecy as it were of the birds 
 and animals which were to come. What 
 could be more prophetic of animals with the
 
 THE PLAN OF CREATION. 119 
 
 power of perfect flight than the leather-winged 
 pterodactyl, half lizard and half bird ? In 
 some of these animals you will see bones only 
 half formed, and useless to that creature, which 
 were brought to perfection in later times, and 
 became the most important part of the body. 
 It is very difficult for me to make all this 
 plain to you, but if you are really interested 
 in it you will go to a museum where the fossils 
 are collected, and then I am very much mis- 
 taken if you do not find a new and strange 
 world opened to you.
 
 120 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 THE history of the human race is of course 
 even more interesting than that of the plants 
 and animals which lived so long before man 
 and prepared the way for him, because man 
 is the "crown of creation." 
 
 When first placed on this Earth he must 
 have been but little superior to the animals in 
 his outward life, though he had very different 
 powers within him. He could gather the 
 fruits of the Earth like them, and perhaps 
 used some of the smaller creatures as food, 
 but he could do little more. He scarcely 
 knew that he possessed the faculties which 
 would in time make him lord of the Earth 
 and the creatures inhabiting it. By slow 
 and painful experience he was to gather 
 those stores of knowledge that were to enable 
 him to overcome difficulties, to provide him 
 with shelter from the weather and protection 
 from dangerous animals, give increasing com-
 
 MAN'S EARLIEST INVENTIONS. 121 
 
 fort and power, and set him so far above all 
 other created things. He found plants and 
 animals for his use, and the dwellings in caves 
 and holes ready made by Nature. He could 
 neither build houses nor make weapons. 
 The first weapon he ever used probably was 
 a stone, which he could throw at small animals. 
 Then he would find out that long, sharp- 
 pointed sticks could be thrown like spears, 
 and he also found that a long pliant piece of 
 wood when bent would fly back, and in this 
 he would see a means of throwing smaller 
 pointed sticks like arrows, and I dare say the 
 discovery of the way of making a bow with 
 a string of twisted animal skin was a great 
 invention, and it certainly would be a very 
 valuable one. Many generations must have 
 passed away before he got even as far as this. 
 It is very easy for us, who see bows and arrows 
 from our childhood, to understand their use at 
 once : but the first human inhabitants of the 
 world had to find them out for themselves. 
 They began with no knowledge at all. The 
 beasts of the field and the fruits of the Earth 
 were given them, but they could MAKE nothing.
 
 122 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 They had not even the natural covering of 
 hair, or wool, or feathers, which animals and 
 birds have, and they must first have clothed 
 themselves with skins of these. The wants 
 of their daily life were so great that they had 
 no time to think of anything else, but when 
 it became easier to satisfy these bodily wants 
 their minds turned to other things. They must 
 have seen that when the seeds and fruits of 
 plants fall upon the ground they grow and pro- 
 duce the same kind of plant, but they did not 
 at first think of gathering a great number of 
 these seeds and sowing them in one place and 
 making a garden. They could wander about 
 and gather all they needed as they became 
 ripe, for there were few people then. Their 
 life was like that of the lilies of the field, they 
 " toiled not neither did they spin," as Christ 
 says of the flowers, but when they began to 
 increase in number something more was 
 wanted. People began to feel something 
 within them which we call " intellect," and 
 this must be satisfied. It was not enough to 
 live as if they were no nobler than the animals. 
 Something stirred in their minds which told 
 them thev must not stand still.
 
 THE ORIGIN OF WRITING. 123 
 
 The Creator has made both us and the 
 wood and stone and metals, and has given 
 to us the power to make other things out of 
 them. Thus we are nearer to Him in power 
 than any of the animals who cannot change the 
 rough materials into other forms. We admire 
 the simple and really beautiful nest of the 
 bird, but we feel that our power is greater 
 when we consider our splendid buildings and 
 steam-engines, our ships, and our many con- 
 quests over difficulties. But if we did not 
 use these greater powers of mind and hand 
 well, we should find them grow weaker and 
 weaker until we might almost lose them. 
 
 You may easily suppose that there was a 
 time when men could not write, and there 
 were no books of any kind, nor any other 
 means of exchanging thoughts except through 
 spoken language. The earliest histories 
 about the human race always speak of men 
 who lived before those histories were written. 
 We have nothing about the earliest men 
 written by themselves. It is always someone 
 else who writes of them, referring to their 
 deeds, and to events which happened long 
 before.
 
 124 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 The art of writing has grown up gradu- 
 ally and very slowly, for when the inhabitants 
 of the Earth became numerous they felt the 
 need of some way of expressing themselves to 
 those at a distance from them, and for making 
 a record of things that happened and might 
 be forgotten. Some of the earliest means 
 of writing were by pictures, like the picture 
 writings of Mexico 1 found by the Spanish 
 conquerors, and something of the same kind 
 is even now used by the Chinese and 
 Japanese. Their writing is made up partly 
 of pictures and partly of queer signs which 
 stand for the names of things, as you know if 
 you have ever seen one of their books. One 
 of the oldest forms of writing known is the 
 hieroglyphic, which is said to have been first 
 used by the Egyptians about 2,100 years 
 before Christ, and another is the arrow-shaped 
 writing of the Assyrians. These were cut on 
 stone and metal tablets, and most of them are 
 the histories of their kings. But there are 
 some writings on stone in India which are 
 thought to be older still. The Egyptians 
 
 1 A fine Mexican MS. on diapered cloth, with figures and 
 mystical signs, has lately been added to the MS. department 
 of the British Museum.
 
 WRITING BY SIGNS. 125 
 
 made great progress in writing afterwards 
 when papyrus was invented. 1 This is a kind 
 of paper made from a reed which grows 
 abundantly in the river Nile, and many of 
 these papyrus writings are preserved in the 
 British Museum, as well as the writings on 
 stone of the Egyptians and Assyrians, and 
 learned men have spelled out a great deal of 
 the history of these nations from them, though 
 the language is quite different from any 
 spoken or written now. 
 
 Picture writing was most likely one of 
 the earliest inventions in this way : but it 
 was so troublesome that signs were used to 
 express the same things as the picture. For 
 instance, suppose a history of a king was to be 
 written. The word "king" would be shown 
 by something he always wore, such as his 
 crown, and this sign would become more 
 simple until at last it might not be anything 
 like a crown ; but it would be remembered 
 that the sign stood for a king all the same. 
 The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, 
 means an ox, and the letter is something like 
 
 1 Some fine examples of papyrus writings on the North- 
 west Staircase, Upper Floor.
 
 126 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 the shape of the head of that animal with 
 its horns ; and another letter, called shin, 
 which in Hebrew means a tooth, is actually 
 very like a tooth with three points. In many 
 languages these signs have become so altered 
 that they do not now resemble the things 
 they at first stood for ; but the first steps in the 
 invention of written language were certainly 
 made by signs representing the thing of 
 which the person wished to give an idea. 
 But you will learn all about these ancient 
 writings from other books. 
 
 The men whose lives I am going to 
 describe lived long before any of these writ- 
 ings were invented. They spoke a language 
 of course, though there is nothing left to show 
 that they knew of any kind of writing, and they 
 are called Pre-historic men because they lived 
 before there were any histories either written 
 by themselves or about them. But they 
 could draw a little, as we know from the 
 pictures of animals, birds, and fishes scratched 
 upon pieces of slate, and bone, and stone found 
 in their graves. Perhaps these pictures were 
 memorials of their great or wise men, or showed 
 that they were clever hunters, or fishermen.
 
 PRE-HISTORIC MAN. 127 
 
 They knew the use of fire. Half burnt 
 bones and wood and ashes are plentiful in the 
 caves where they lived. They had none of 
 the means we possess for kindling fire, and 
 there are only two ways by which they could 
 have got it. They might have rubbed two 
 pieces of very dry wood together until the 
 heat lighted them, as many savages do at 
 the present time ; or they might have struck 
 sparks from flint upon rotten wood and blown 
 the spark into a flame. We may be sure that 
 when once a fire was lighted they would take 
 care it did not go out, and if they wanted to 
 travel they would carry with them a piece of 
 smouldering wood to light the fire again. I 
 do not suppose that these pre-historic men 
 were any more civilized than the savages of 
 Australia and other countries, and I have often 
 thought when looking at these savages that 
 they live in almost exactly the same way as 
 the earliest inhabitants of Europe did. They 
 have the same shaped weapons and tools 
 made of stone, and these are fixed to the 
 handles in the same way. They have the 
 same kinds of needles and fish-hooks made 
 of bone, and they sew skins together with
 
 128 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 threads made from the sinews of animals. 
 Thus we see men living now in many parts 
 of the world who are quite as uncivilized as 
 the old inhabitants of Europe, who lived 
 perhaps thousands of years before the Egyp- 
 tians and Assyrians. 
 
 These very ancient men knew nothing 
 about metals. All their tools were made of 
 flint, or bone, or stone, and they were of the 
 rough shape you see in the pictures on the 
 next page, and it is for this reason that this 
 has been called the Stone Age. These were 
 chipped out with great trouble and labour, 
 and most of them were not even polished. 
 With these they had to kill animals for food, 
 to cut down trees, and fight against their 
 enemies. The skeleton of a mastodon was 
 found in the state of Missouri in America 
 about thirty-five years ago with numbers of 
 these flint arrow-heads underneath and near 
 it. Perhaps it had been shot at with arrows, 
 and when it died the flint points fell out of its 
 decaying flesh. But it is not likely that these 
 pre-historic men could have killed many such 
 large animals, unless they caught them in pits 
 covered over with branches of trees and earth,
 
 1. Flint Arrow-head. 4. Bone Harpoon. 
 
 2. Stone Axe in handle. 5. Bone Needles. 
 
 3. flint Knife. 6. Sceptre made vf Horn. 
 
 Spoon.
 
 PRE-HISTORIC MAN. 131 
 
 into which they might fall, as elephants are 
 sometimes caught in Africa. 
 
 Nothing shows us so well the immense 
 time which must have passed since the men 
 of the stone age lived as that these flin 
 weapons and tools are found nearly all over 
 the world, in Northern Europe, including our 
 own country, in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, 
 Palestine, Africa, Japan, America, &c. ; and 
 yet none of the present inhabitants of these 
 countries have any history or tradition of the 
 time when they were used. Metals are now 
 used instead, and there is no record of the 
 time when flint only was known. We are 
 quite certain however that the stone age men 
 lived at the same period as the great animals 
 of the Tertiary age, the mammoth, the mas- 
 todon, the woolly rhinoceros, the Irish stag, 
 the cave bear, and others you have read of 
 in former chapters, because flint and stone 
 weapons are found in the same beds of earth 
 with these animals. 1 
 
 Suppose one of the present Indian or 
 
 1 British Antiquities Room, upper floor, Middle and Upper 
 Shelf-cases, Nos. i, 2, and 5-12, flint and stone implements. 
 Table-case B, horn implements from French caves and Swiss 
 lake-dwellings. 
 
 K 2
 
 132 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 African elephants with his rider were to fall 
 into a river and they were to sink to the 
 bottom and be covered with mud, and suppose 
 his rider had in his pocket some of our sove- 
 reigns. If that elephant should be accidentally 
 dug up thousands of years to come, when most 
 likely all elephants will have died off the earth, 
 people would know for certain, from the date 
 and figure of the Queen on the money, that 
 elephants were used by the English in this 
 reign, even if all our books and monuments 
 had perished, and a new people inhabited the 
 Earth. Something of the same kind has hap- 
 pened to prove to us that the stone-age men 
 saw the mammoth alive. In one of their 
 graves there is a slice of a mammoth's great 
 back tooth with a beautiful picture of the 
 animal, with his bristly hair, scratched on the 
 ivory, and there are also many of the flint 
 and stone weapons which show that the 
 skeleton in the grave was that of a pri- 
 meval man. This little picture tells its tale 
 more faithfully than any history. It is all 
 the more certain to tell it truly because it was 
 never meant to tell one. When that man 
 was buried with this sign that he was a
 
 PRE-HISTORIC ART. 133 
 
 mighty hunter of the mammoth, or an artist, 
 no one could imagine that he would ever be 
 dug up to show us, who come so long after- 
 wards, that he saw the mammoth roaming 
 through the forests of the far away past. 
 There can be no doubt that it is a very good 
 drawing of the mammoth with its long turned- 
 up tusks, like those in the picture at the 
 beginning of the book. 
 
 In another place a picture of a fight 
 between some reindeer scratched upon a 
 piece of slate has been found. This was in a 
 cave in France, and it, as well as the numbers 
 of bones of these animals in the caves, shows 
 that the reindeer, which now only inhabits the 
 Arctic regions, must have been common then 
 in France. You will see drawings of both 
 these on page 135. 
 
 These primeval people built no houses. 
 They lived in' natural caves, and scattered the 
 remains of their food about the floor, so that 
 we know what they ate. Among the animals 
 they used for food were the horse, the reindeer, 
 the ox, the cave-lion and bear, the wolf, the 
 hyena, the goat, the hare and several others, 
 besides salmon and other fish. They were
 
 134 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 very fond of the marrow of the bones, which 
 they cracked with stone hammers, and had 
 little spoons made of bone with which to pick 
 it out. 
 
 They had places for making flint wea- 
 pons too. At Cissbury Camp, near Worthing, 
 there is one of their old workshops. There 
 are galleries dug into the chalk where they 
 got the flints, and there are thousands of chips 
 of flint lying about, with half finished arrow- 
 heads, and some of the tools they dug with. 
 They had no spades or pickaxes ; but they 
 used the broad, flat, shoulder-blade bone of 
 the ox as a spade, and the sharp brow angler 
 of a deer's horn for a pickaxe, to get these 
 flints out with. It must have been very hard 
 work for them, because bone spades and horn 
 pickaxes would soon wear out, and would not 
 be nearly so useful as ours made of iron. 
 
 It is difficult to be certain how these stone- 
 age people cooked their food. Of course 
 they could have roasted it, and the half- 
 burnt bones in some caves show that they 
 did so ; but in some caves in France there is 
 not a single burnt bone to be found. In 
 these French cave dwellings, too, there are
 
 PRE-HISTORIC DRA WINGS. 
 
 135 
 
 XI. 
 
 Picture of Mammoth Scratched on Ivory. 
 
 Fight between Reindeer Scratched on Slate.
 
 DWELLINGS AND FOOD. 137 
 
 no pieces of earthenware, as there are in 
 some others ; so that the people could not 
 have boiled it. unless they had wooden 
 pots and dropped red hot stones into the 
 water in them until the meat got boiled, as 
 some savages do now. Or they might have 
 cooked it under the hot ashes. 
 
 The people who used earthenware must 
 have made more progress. It is easy to 
 understand how they made this useful dis- 
 covery. Suppose they had lighted a fire 
 upon a damp clay soil, the earth would get 
 baked hard and crack off in pieces, and they 
 would see that this soil could be worked in 
 the hands while soft into the shape of pans 
 and dishes, which could be dried quite hard 
 in the sun or baked in hot ashes, just as 
 boys make clay marbles now. They could 
 live much more comfortably even with these 
 rough earthenware things, and cook their 
 food more conveniently ; but they still used 
 the stone and flint tools and weapons, and 
 iron was still unknown to them. 
 
 The people of whom I have been speak- 
 ing are principally the men of the First Stone 
 Age, when the art of polishing tools and
 
 138 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 weapons had not been found out. They 
 simply chipped these things out of the flints 
 and left them very rough ; but the men of the 
 next, or Second Stone Age, made great im- 
 provements. They ground their flint knives 
 and axes with other stones, and rubbed them 
 down to sharp edges and points, so that they 
 must have been much more useful for killing 
 and cutting up the animals they hunted. All 
 their bone and horn tools are much better 
 made, and sometimes ornamented prettily 
 with marks cut upon them. The Second 
 Stone Age men evidently wore clothing, 
 most probably made of the skins of animals 
 for the long strips of bone with a hole 
 at one end which you see in the picture 
 could not have been used for any other 
 purpose, except to draw threads through 
 something. The threads were very likely 
 either the sinews of animals pulled out of the 
 flesh, or thin strips of their skins, or perhaps 
 the inner bark of a tree twisted into a kind 
 of string. In the colder parts of Europe 
 and America these ancient people would 
 need some protection from the weather. 
 How; then did the people of the First Stone
 
 THE SECOND STONE AGE. 139 
 
 Age manage, if they had no bone needles, 
 as I think they had not, with which to make 
 clothing ? They must have wrapped them- 
 selves in the skins just as they came from 
 the backs of the animals. 
 
 It is not easy to be always sure, when we 
 find a cave and all these relics of pre-historic 
 man, whether the inhabitants belonged to the 
 First or the Second Stone Age. Sometimes 
 there are signs of polishing and grinding on 
 the tools, and then we may suppose that men 
 were gradually getting more skilful, until they 
 finished off all their weapons beautifully. 
 But there is such a very great difference in 
 the perfection of these useful articles found 
 in some places and those found in others 
 that we have no doubt men made slow - pro- 
 gress, from the rough or First Stone Age, 
 to the polished or Second Stone Age, 
 
 In neither the first nor second stone period 
 had men yet learned to build any kind of 
 habitations. They lived in caves simply, like 
 wild animals. On the banks of the river 
 Vezere in France, which has cut its way 
 deeply through the rock, there are some 
 celebrated caves once inhabited by pre-historic
 
 I 4 o THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 men, and some of them are very large. 
 They were most likely hollowed out in the 
 cliff by water, and many generations of men 
 lived here. In one of them four human 
 skeletons were found, with plenty of stone and 
 flint tools, besides the bones of the mammoth 
 and lion, reindeer and other animals. The 
 mammoth then as well as the reindeer lived 
 at that time in the valley of the Vezere. 
 There is no doubt that these caves were in- 
 habited at separate times by people who used 
 only the roughest and simplest stone tools, 
 and by others who had made some progress 
 and could polish their tools and make them of 
 bone and could scratch pictures of animals 
 upon slips of bone and slate. It is curious that 
 all these drawings are side-view drawings, and 
 they are only outlines, just like the drawings 
 of children now, and the Esquimaux of the 
 Arctic regions ; because these people, although 
 they were grown up, had not discovered the 
 art of drawing in perspective and shading 
 the figures. Still the pictures are wonderfully 
 true to nature, and must have been copied 
 from living animals. There is no earthenware 
 in any of these caves, so that the useful art of
 
 THE FRENCH CAVES. 141 
 
 making pottery had not been discovered, 
 neither is there any in the caves in Switzer- 
 land, where the bones of the mammoth, lion, 
 and rhinoceros are also found, and the tools 
 and weapons are much the same as those in 
 the French caverns. It is impossible to say 
 whether the cave-dwellers of France and 
 Switzerland lived at the same time exactly, 
 but they were in about the same condition of 
 civilization, and they must both have been 
 quite familiar with the appearance of the 
 mammoth and lion, and other animals, which 
 are not mentioned in any history, how- 
 ever old it may be, as inhabitants of these 
 countries. 
 
 A discovery has lately been made in 
 France of a large cavern near Belfort, in the 
 limestone rock, which has been covered up 
 for ages. The quarrymen while cutting out 
 the stone came upon a small opening leading 
 into a very large cave, in which there was 
 a great quantity of human skeletons and 
 bones and some beautifully ornamented vases, 
 polished stone bracelets, and a mat of plaited 
 rushes. To these people, then, the arts of 
 pottery and weaving were known, and this
 
 I 4 2 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 was probably one of their burying-places. 
 They were evidently much more civilized 
 than the ancient people of the valley of the 
 Vezere ; but this cave must also be of a 
 great age, and its inhabitants have left no 
 record of their history in any kind of 
 writing. 
 
 Quite lately, too, we have learned some- 
 thing of the early races of man in Colorado. 
 Many of the caves in that country have been 
 altered and made more like regular houses, 
 and some appear even to have been cut 
 out of the rock entirely by human hands ; 
 and in the plains there are ruins of large 
 cities. 
 
 Though still in the stone age, for all the 
 weapons yet found among these ruins are 
 of stone, the Colorado people were more 
 civilized than the stone-age people of the 
 Vezere caverns, because they had begun to 
 build and knew how to make pottery. It is 
 strange, too, that the present natives of Colo- 
 rado are not so civilized as the early people, 
 and if they have descended from them they 
 have not improved, but rather the contrary. 
 There are other caverns in various parts of
 
 DWELLINGS IN COLORADO. 143 
 
 the world containing these curious relics of 
 races long since passed away, but some of 
 the principal have been mentioned, enough 
 perhaps to interest you and show you that 
 men were living in Europe together with the 
 large animals of the Tertiary period, and that 
 they had made very little progress in the arts 
 and manufactures, and had not even begun to 
 build the roughest houses. 
 
 In many parts of the world even now 
 there are savages nearly as uncivilized as the 
 cave-dwellers of Europe were then. When 
 Captain Cook visited New Zealand, more 
 than a hundred years ago, the natives there 
 had nothing but stone and bone tools, very like 
 those found in the European caverns, and the 
 inhabitants of some of the islands in the Pacific 
 Ocean still use stone axes and hammers 
 and bone needles. 1 Captain Moresby, too, 
 who made a voyage to the south-east coast 
 of New Guinea a few years ago, tells us 
 that the natives have beautiful stone axes, 
 but they were so ignorant of the use of iron 
 that they refused to give him one of their 
 
 1 Examples of stone implements of New Zealanders in 
 Ethnographical Room, Cases No. 45-48, upper floor.
 
 144 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 stone axes for a new iron hatchet which he 
 offered them. No doubt the stone weapon 
 cost a great deal of labour and patience to 
 make, and perhaps the iron one was made by 
 machinery in a few minutes, and was really 
 more useful, but the native had proved his 
 own axe and knew nothing of the iron one, 
 so that it is no wonder that he refused it. 
 But what a history these two axes tell the 
 stone and the iron ! The stone shows us 
 man in his childhood, and the iron man in his 
 manhood, and what an immensely long time 
 there is between the two. How much 
 thought, and trial and failure, and patience 
 and industry, were spent by mankind before 
 the stone axe grew into the iron ! 
 
 In Europe man has long since grown out 
 of his childhood, but in many parts of the 
 world he is no more civilized than the men 
 who saw the mammoth crashing through the 
 forests of England and France, and heard 
 the lion roar at night on the banks of 
 the Thames, and watched the hippopotamus 
 swimming across the river at Westminster. 
 It is most likely, then, that Europe arid parts 
 of Asia and America were inhabited long
 
 THEY SAW THE MAMMOTH ALIVE, 145 
 
 before those places where men are even now 
 in the stone age such as the islands in the 
 Pacific Ocean, New Guinea, Australia, &c. 
 
 What a life the pre-historic men of Europe 
 must have lived ! Here they were surrounded 
 by huge dangerous animals, and had no 
 means of protecting themselves against them 
 but with these rough stone weapons. Where 
 London now stands with its miles of streets 
 and busy life there was a mighty forest, and 
 the mammoth and rhinoceros tramped through 
 it by day, and the lion and hyena hunted 
 the deer at night. When the pre-historic men 
 came down to the banks of the Thames in 
 the day-time to spear salmon, they saw the 
 hippopotamus plunging about in the water 
 among the rushes, sweeping the long grass 
 into their wide mouths, and swimming from 
 side to side with their young ones perched 
 upon their necks. It must have been a 
 grand sight, but a fearful one too, and it is 
 no wonder that men thought the caves the 
 only safe places to live in. 
 
 Sometimes in India the elephants come 
 into the villages at night and throw down 
 wooden houses and kill people, and they are
 
 146 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 very much feared, so that we can suppose 
 how much more terrible the mammoth misiit 
 
 o 
 
 have been to the uncivilized cave-dwellers. 
 If they shot at him with the flint-pointed 
 arrows they could scarcely hurt him, and it 
 is more likely that they got out of his way as 
 quickly as possible whenever they met him, 
 and took good care never to interfere with 
 the lion and rhinoceros. 
 
 THE LAKE-DWELLERS. 
 
 Among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, 
 there were some who did not live in caves ; 
 but I think they must have lived a long time 
 after the cave-dwellers, when they built their 
 houses out in the middle of the lakes. 
 These houses were built in a very curious 
 way, and the remains of them have been dis- 
 covered in Ireland and Scotland, Switzerland 
 and other countries. The people carried 
 quantities of stones, and earth, and sticks out 
 into the lake and let them sink to the bottom. 
 Then when they had piled up enough to make 
 an island, they laid wood across and set up 
 theirhuts, and lived there surrounded by water. 
 These were very poor houses of course ; but
 
 XII.
 
 THE LAKE-DWELLERS. 149 
 
 when men had begun to build for themselves, 
 they would find how much more comfortable 
 they were than in damp and dark caves. 
 They must have had some kind of boats or 
 canoes, or they could not have passed between 
 their lake-dwellings and the land unless they 
 swam to them ; but I do not think that any of 
 these boats have been found. Perhaps they 
 were made of the dried skins of animals 
 stretched over wooden frames, as I have seen 
 savages make boats. 
 
 There was another way of building these 
 lake-dwellings, and a better way too. Long 
 poles were driven into the earth at the bottom 
 of the water, and when the builders had got 
 enough of these together they laid other 
 poles across them, and built their huts on 
 this floor above the water. People are living 
 now in much the same way near the Orinoco 
 river in South America, in New Guinea, and in 
 Central Africa. 1 The land all round is covered 
 with water from the overflowing of the rivers, 
 which are very large, and the huts are built up 
 on these poles out of the way of it. The lake- 
 dwellers of Europe would thus be safer in their 
 
 1 In Lake Mohrya. Across Africa, by V. L. Cameron.
 
 1 50 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 houses from dangerous animals than if they 
 were on land. They were more civilized than 
 the cave-dwellers, but still a great many of their 
 tools and weapons were of stone and bone ; 
 yet we know that they had made wonderful 
 progress, because they had learned to make 
 pottery, and even to weave cloths out of hemp 
 or flax. They had most likely begun to plant 
 and cultivate the land, too, for corn is found 
 about these dwellings, and the bones of 
 domestic animals are very numerous. They 
 had left the cave-dwellers a long way behind 
 in many things, in wearing artificial clothing, 
 in cultivating the land, and in keeping do- 
 mestic animals; but their implements that 
 is, their weapons and tools were not much 
 improved, and were very much like those of 
 the cave-dwellers, though better finished and 
 more polished than some of theirs. 
 
 But not all the articles used by the lake 
 people were of stone and bone. Some of those 
 who lived in the Swiss lakes had ornaments, 
 such as bracelets and hair-pins, made of the 
 metal called bronze, and no doubt they made 
 spear-heads of the metal, because they would 
 look to usefulness before ornament.
 
 THE LAKE-DWELLERS. 151 
 
 Now you see how these people seem to 
 have lived : first the old stone age men, then 
 those of the newer or polished stone age, and 
 lastly the lake-dwellers. The people of both 
 the first and second stone ages certainly saw 
 the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, 
 and reindeer alive in France, Switzerland, and 
 England ; but when the lake-dwellings were 
 built, all these animals, except perhaps the 
 reindeer, had died, and most of the animals 
 were the same as they are now. None of these 
 people have left us any kind of history what- 
 ever, except that which their simple works tell 
 us, their flint and bone weapons, and their 
 dwellings. They have set up no gigantic 
 monuments like the Egyptians or the Druids. 
 They thought of no men to come after them 
 who would take an interest in their ways ; but 
 it is fortunate that what they did make was 
 of such lasting materials as stone and flint, or 
 we should have known next to nothing about 
 their lives. 
 
 It is impossible to say how many thou- 
 sands of years may have passed before the 
 rough stone weapons were replaced by the 
 polished stone, or the cave was exchanged
 
 152 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 for an artificial house in a lake ; but you must 
 feel in your minds that the time was immense, 
 and the more we study the ways and works 
 of pre-historic man, the more certain we 
 become that it is longer than the whole time 
 that has passed since men first began to use 
 any kind of writing. 
 
 KITCHEN-MIDDENS. 
 
 I dare say you have seen untidy people 
 in country places, and even in towns, throw 
 oyster-shells and broken dishes and dirt out- 
 side their doors until quite a heap is formed. 
 This is called a " midden," and the habit of 
 doing this is a very old one. We learn just 
 a little more of the history of man from great 
 middens made by ancient people in several 
 countries. They were first discovered in 
 Denmark, and since then they have been 
 found in Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand. 
 They are sometimes very large, and must 
 have been used by the whole village as places 
 to throw the refuse of their cookery in. When 
 these heaps have been dug into all sorts of 
 things have been found in them the shells of 
 oysters and mussels, bones of fishes, birds, and
 
 THE MIDDEN MAKERS. 153 
 
 animals, pieces of broken earthenware, little 
 ornaments, stone axes, arrow-heads, wood 
 ashes, burnt bones, and other odds and ends. 
 In Brazil many of these kitchen-middens are 
 on the sea-shore, and it seems as if the people 
 who made them came there to live on the 
 shell-fish, for the shells are the same as those 
 living in the sea close by now. In New 
 Zealand the middens contain many of the 
 bones of the Moa, which was described in 
 " The Animal Part," and has now perished, and 
 these are cracked in such a manner that the 
 people evidently wanted to get at the marrow 
 in them, and it shows too that this gigantic 
 bird was common in New Zealand then. 
 The midden makers seemed to have lived in 
 the open air, and wherever food was most 
 plentiful. Perhaps they built huts of the 
 bark and small branches of trees like the 
 Australian savages, but such houses would 
 not last. We only know of the life of the 
 midden makers from these heaps. Their 
 weapons are of the same kind and pattern as 
 those of the Second Stone Age, but they had 
 learned to make rough earthenware dishes 
 and basins, and some pieces of a woven
 
 154 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 material have been found, and pieces of wood 
 and bone worked with a little skill. Whether 
 they lived after or before the lake-dwellers I 
 cannot say, but I should think about the. 
 same time. 
 
 These pre-historic people, nevertheless, 
 were not always thinking of making things 
 which were useful. They thought too of 
 making ornaments, many of which are found 
 in their 'dwellings and graves. Like ourselves, 
 they had an idea that little trinkets improved 
 their appearance. In one grave a skeleton 
 was found with a small pile of shells under 
 its neck, which no doubt had been strung 
 together as a necklace, and when the string 
 rotted the shells parted and fell in a heap under 
 the head, to be a memorial of that ancient man 
 or woman's possession of the same feelings as 
 our own. Various little articles, too, found 
 about the lake-dwellings show that people 
 liked to decorate themselves. 
 
 We shall never know what language they 
 spoke, but they must have been able to tell 
 their thoughts to one another. It was most 
 likely a simple language with few words as 
 names for things and a simple grammar, like
 
 THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 155 
 
 the language of savages, because they had 
 not so many things to talk about as we have. 
 The names of animals would perhaps be 
 imitated from their cries and the noises they 
 made. These cries would be among the most 
 familiar sounds to them, and when they 
 wished to speak of some animal the simplest 
 way would be to imitate the noise it generally 
 makes. If we think of our own language, we 
 shall see how very likely this was. We have 
 many such words. We teach our children the 
 names of animals by the sounds they make. 
 The dog we call " bow-wow," the cow "moo- 
 moo," the duck " quack-quack," and many 
 other names of the same kind which you will 
 think of yourselves. At the present time 
 even the name by which the Egyptians call 
 the donkey has almost exactly the same 
 sound as our " hee-haw." This trick of 
 doubling or repeating the sound, too, is very 
 common among savages, who are as far be- 
 hind us as the pre-historic men were. The 
 natives of Australia give these double names 
 to" a great many animals and things, and 
 sometimes do the same with English words. 
 They call fish " ningy-ningy," and a certain
 
 156 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 tree the " bunya-bunya," and their language 
 is full of such words. But it is not only the 
 names of things which have been made in 
 this way. Verbs as well as nouns have grown 
 up thus. When we whisper to one another, 
 that word imitates the low sound we make. 
 
 I shall leave you to trace the natural origin 
 of the following words, and think how much of 
 man's spoken language is taken from common 
 sounds. Thus we have roar, shriek, whistle, 
 hiss, sigh, sing, ring, thump, bump, clash, 
 clang, bang, twang, clap, smack, slap, smash, 
 swish, swirl, gong, thong, boom, bellow, 
 batter, chatter, clatter, snap, snip, whip, 
 gurgle, shiver, quiver, rumble, roll, rattle, 
 prattle, and a hundred more. Words thus 
 derived from familiar sounds abound in all 
 languages, and they, no doubt, are the easy 
 steps by which men climbed to a more com- 
 plicated speech. The earliest men must 
 have been obliged to pay great attention to 
 animals and birds, which have voices of their 
 own; for to hunt and catch them was the 
 principal occupation of their lives ; therefore, 
 when speaking of them to one another, they 
 would naturally call them by names re-
 
 A HUMAN FOSSIL. 157 
 
 sembling the sounds they made. Our verbs 
 "to squeak" and "to squeal " are certainly 
 taken from the cries of animals when in pain ; 
 but I have said enough to show you how 
 language grew up among pre-historic people. 
 We do not know for certain that they had 
 any musical instruments, but they would hear 
 the sighing of the wind among the trees, and 
 it would almost certainly be found out that 
 blowing down a hollow stick or reed, open at 
 one end and closed at the other, would make 
 a whistle ; but if they used any of these 
 things they would not last like the stone tools, 
 and have decayed away ; and we do know 
 that they had begun to draw upon such im- 
 perishable materials as bone and slate. 
 
 There is a very interesting specimen of a 
 human fossil in the British Museum, which 
 you ought to go and see, if you can ; but in 
 case you are not able there is a drawing of it 
 on page 159.* This specimen was brought 
 to England about the year 1814. Others 
 like it have since been found imbedded in the 
 hard breccia limestone rock at the same place 
 on the shore of the island of Guadaloupe. 
 
 1 At the end of Room VI., opposite the door, North Gallery.
 
 1 5 8 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 The skeleton most likely was that of a 
 woman, from the shape of some of the bones, 
 and most probably was of the race of Caribs, 
 of whom there are none living now. Perhaps 
 this was originally a burying place of the 
 ancient inhabitants of the island, and when 
 the sea washed the small broken pieces of 
 shells and corals over it (all of which contain 
 lime) they hardened into breccia rock, and 
 the skeleton became completely imbedded in 
 it. This must have taken a very long time, 
 at all events ; but I do not think the Guada- 
 loupe fossils are as old as the people who 
 lived in the caves in France. Some little 
 ornaments and articles of human workman- 
 ship are found with these skeletons, which 
 show that the people to whom they belonged 
 were still in the Stone Age. There is very 
 little to judge from when we wish to get some 
 idea of the time these fossils have been in 
 this breccia : but at this particular place 
 the rock is formed pretty quickly, as we can 
 see ; and it is quite likely that these skeletons 
 were buried there long after the mammoth, 
 , rhinoceros, and hippopotamus died out of 
 Europe. However, they are the most com-
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Guadaloupe Human Fossil.
 
 THE BRONZE AND IRON AGES. 161 
 
 plete specimens we have of any fossil human 
 beings. In looking at the drawing you will 
 see the leg bones and hips, part of the back, 
 bone, the ribs of one side, and an arm bone ; 
 but you see no skull, because the bones of 
 the skull are very thin, and have become 
 crushed down into the limestone. In one of 
 these fossils, which they have in Paris, taken 
 from near the same place, the bones are 
 much more distinct, and part of the lower 
 jaw with some teeth in it can be seen. These 
 fossil men no doubt lived before the period 
 of written human history began ; but they 
 are not considered to be at all the oldest of 
 pre-historic men. 
 
 Two periods in the life of mankind fol- 
 lowed all these long-lost and forgotten people, 
 and they are called the Bronze Age and the 
 Iron Age ; but now history comes in, and 
 there are plenty of old records and books to 
 tell you about these. Bronze is a mixed 
 metal of copper and tin, and it was used by 
 the oldest nations who have left any histories 
 the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Ro- 
 mans. It was better than stone because it 
 could be made sharper and would not chip, 
 
 M
 
 162 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 and swords and armour, vases, axes, hammers, 
 needles, &c., were made of it. 1 
 
 The Stone Age is beyond all history, the 
 Bronze begins with it, and the Iron Age 
 began at some distant time before the dawn of 
 authentic history. Thus we are told, in Genesis 
 iv. 22, that Tubal Cain taught people to make 
 it. It was used also by the Egyptians for per- 
 haps 2,000 years before the Christian era ; 
 but the real Iron Age is that in which we are 
 living now. We can, indeed, make all metals 
 much better than any of the older nations. 
 
 But there is a wide gap between the time 
 when people left off using stone and dis- 
 covered bronze and iron ; and if one of the 
 Druids could come to life he might help us to 
 fill it up, because those old British priests had 
 many secrets, which they told to one another 
 from generation to generation. 
 
 If the Spanish conquerors had not de- 
 stroyed the civilization of Mexico and Peru, we 
 might know something of the discovery of 
 the metals there, and the people of India and 
 China must have used them long ago ; but 
 
 1 See examples in the Bronze Room, upper floor, British 
 Museum.
 
 EASTER ISLAND MONUMENTS. 163 
 
 the first use of metal in any country where it 
 was found out would most likely be before 
 the people had begun to put their language 
 into any kind of writing, so that the time would 
 be forgotten among the many scraps of lost 
 knowledge which we have tried to collect from 
 the remains of the industry of pre-historic man. 
 
 We have seen how much these ancient 
 people differed from us in their civilization, 
 and how far they were behind us in every- 
 thing ; but we must not suppose that they 
 were very different in bodily size and shape. 
 Some of their skulls might have belonged to 
 a philosopher, or they might have contained 
 the thoughtless brains of a savage. The 
 skulls from the Cromagnon and Engis caves 
 are quite equal in size and shape to those of 
 several uncivilized, and even of some civi- 
 lized races of the present time, and there are 
 people in all large cities whose heads are not 
 better formed. Though the outward signs of 
 their civilization then were so different from 
 ours, it is not certain that their mental 
 capacity was much less. 
 
 A race possessing considerable civiliza- 
 tion may, we know, pass away, as the 
 
 M2
 
 1 64 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 Assyrians and the Pyramid builders have. 
 In one of the Pacific islands Easter Island 
 a thousand miles from the nearest land, 
 there are hundreds of carved images of 
 stone, fifty or sixty feet high, and weighing 
 perhaps a hundred tons each. The people 
 who made these must have been very 
 numerous and must have had considerable 
 skill. Yet they have passed away. The arts 
 of Nineveh and Babylon have only lately 
 become known, so that, you see, the works of 
 a race may easily become hidden from us 
 who follow. Quite lately, too, the works of a 
 partly civilized people have been discovered 
 in Ohio in America. There are there 
 hundreds of mounds and earth embank- 
 ments forming fortified camps. Some of 
 them are several miles round, and they could 
 only have been made by a very numerous 
 and intelligent people who knew something 
 about geometry ; for the circles, squares, and 
 angles of these earthworks are quite as 
 correct as we could make them. Among the 
 multitude of things found here are copper 
 tools made by hammering, ornamental 
 pottery, silver beads, plates of mica with
 
 THE OHIO EARTHWORKS, 165 
 
 scrolls and designs engraved on them, and 
 carefully carved pieces of stone. These 
 carvings are most curious and excellently 
 finished. They represent human heads and 
 many animals, such as the bear, otter, wolf, 
 beaver, raccoon, frog, rattlesnake, heron, crow, 
 &c. A people, then, who could do these 
 things and took pleasure in doing them must 
 have possessed great intelligence and a 
 knowledge of things far beyond a simple 
 state. They even had religious ideas, such 
 as they were, for they had places for sacrifice. 
 All their works are now overgrown by forests, 
 but it is impossible to mistake them ; yet the 
 native Indians of Ohio living now have no 
 idea that such a people lived in their country 
 before them, and no tradition at all about a 
 people whose civilization was so far superior 
 to their own. 
 
 We may come nearer to our own times* 
 and look at the Assyrians and Egyptians. 
 Until quite recently nothing was known about 
 the Assyrians except what could be learned 
 from the few references made to them in 
 Scripture and some ancient writers ; but Mr. 
 Layard dug up their cities, and found that
 
 1 66 THE HUMAN PART. 
 
 they possessed the arts of building, sculpture, 
 working in metals, and a written language. 
 All this was buried under the sand of a 
 desert ! Then there is the great Pyramid 
 of Egypt, built in a way that we could not 
 surpass, and with much knowledge of geo- 
 metry and other sciences. 1 The men who 
 designed and constructed these works could 
 not have lived among a half-barbarous people ; 
 and as these are the highest works of the 
 people, how much there must have been 
 that went before, of which there is no trace 
 now, when Assyria and Egypt were in their 
 age of stone axes and flint arrow-heads. 
 
 I do not think that the Stone-Age men 
 of Europe were nearly so civilized. At all 
 events, they have not left any such imperish- 
 able monuments as the gigantic images of 
 Easter Island, the earthworks of the Ohio 
 people, or the sculptures, writings, and build- 
 ings of the Assyrians and Egyptians ; but they 
 might have been more civilized than they 
 seem to have been from their simple weapons 
 and tools. They might have made many 
 
 1 Built of nummulitic limestone, composed of shells of 
 foraminifera. See Case 15, Room V., North Gallery.
 
 THE WORK OF TIME. 167 
 
 things which were perishable, and have been 
 destroyed by time things which would have 
 given us a higher belief in their intelligence 
 and civilization. 
 
 The past history of the human race may 
 be compared to the rise and fall of the tide. 
 Wave after wave has risen higher and higher 
 on the everlasting shore of Time, and when 
 the tide was at its highest it has fallen again 
 slowly, to rise again and again in the same 
 way through many ages. We know that 
 man may rise slowly from a simple condition 
 to much civilization and power, and may 
 again sink back almost to barbarism, as has 
 been the case with the people of whom we 
 have been speaking, and then again a new 
 civilization may grow up. It is possible that 
 all now savage nations are the sinking de- 
 scendants of some, in comparison, once civi- 
 lized people. Modern nations are taking up 
 the ground of savages all over the world, and 
 soon there will be no trace of these simple 
 people. Thus it may have been with man- 
 kind throughout all the time during which 
 they have occupied the earth, and so it may 
 be perhaps again.
 
 168 CONCLUSION. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 I HAVE now put " The Puzzle of Life " to- 
 gether as well as I can, and there is not much 
 more to say. You must do the rest for your- 
 selves by going to the Museums, where all 
 the pieces are collected, and seeing them with 
 your own eyes. When you stand before 
 these silent witnesses to the great age of our 
 Earth, and all that is on it, you will feel how 
 wonderful the story they tell is. They have 
 no words to speak to you, but there is a power 
 in your own minds which interprets their his- 
 tory through your own thoughts. They are 
 only lumps of rock and lifeless bones, but 
 they seem to say to you, " We are living again 
 now, because we are teaching you a lesson 
 which the great Builder of this Universe 
 wishes you to learn from us. There is not a 
 stone or fossil among us but it has its tale 
 to tell a tale of time and tide, and long past
 
 CONCLUSION. 169 
 
 ages, and innumerable changes, and a life that 
 was, and progress from a lower to a higher 
 existence. We have obeyed the same eter- 
 nal laws of one Creator from the beginning, 
 as all things will to the end of time. We 
 have opened the great Book of Nature from 
 the first page of the ' life-dawn animal ' to the 
 last, on which the hand of the Almighty has 
 written the name of Man his most perfect 
 work. We, you, and all things which have 
 lived and will live, have bodies made of 
 particles which will be returned to the Earth, 
 no single atom of which has been destroyed 
 since the first, but has been fashioned over 
 and over again into innumerable forms of 
 tree and flower, of gossamer-winged insect 
 and towering mammoth, throughout the long 
 ages in which our Globe has known day and 
 night, cold and heat, summer and winter." 
 
 There is nothing sad, if we look at it 
 rightly, in this constant succession of life and 
 death. It is 
 
 A moulding 
 
 Of forms, and a wondrous birth, 
 And a growing and fair unfolding 
 Of life from life, and life from death.
 
 170 CONCLUSION. 
 
 For death, a mother benign, 
 Transformeth but destroyeth not, 
 And the new thing fair of the old is wrought. 
 G. F, ARMSTRONG. 
 
 Is it not worth while then to listen to these 
 stories of the Earth to spell them out for 
 ourselves ? They are written everywhere, 
 in the mountains and valleys, the rivers and 
 seas, on the hard faces of granite cliffs, on the 
 rounded pebbles of the sea beach, and even 
 in the finest dust of the roads. We have not 
 to go far to hear them : every foot-step on 
 the ground covers a chapter great or small in 
 the universal history, and the stone walls of 
 our houses could speak with ten thousand 
 tongues of all they witnessed in their long 
 life on the floor of an ancient ocean. 
 
 We can scarcely have a more pleasant 
 occupation and greater interest than in search- 
 ing for and putting together the pieces of this 
 wonderful and beautiful puzzle, and in doing 
 our utmost to " Summon from the shadowy 
 Past the forms that once have been."
 
 INDEX. 
 
 AGE of bronze, 161 ; of iron, 161 ; 
 
 of reptiles, 81 
 ALEPH, 125 
 AMBER, 69 
 AMMONITES, 90, 97 
 ANIMAL PART, the, 77 ; animals of 
 
 coal period, 71 
 ANTS, white, 61 
 
 ARCTIC climate, 67 ; expedition, 67 
 ARCH^OPTERVX, 91, 93 
 AUSTRALIAN savages, 127 
 
 BABYLON and Nineveh, 164, 165 
 BEAR, grisly, 106 
 BEGINNING of life, 58 
 BIRD forms, earliest, 89 ; reptiles, 85 
 BLACKLEAD, 58 
 BOULDERS carried by ice, 48 
 BOGWOOD, 70 
 BOILING springs, 54 
 BRONZE, age of, 161, 162 ; imple- 
 ments in British Museum, 162 
 BRIGHTON Downs, gg 
 BURNING mountains, 19 
 
 CALAMITES, 42, 68 
 
 CANONS of Colorado, 8 
 
 CAVES of Engis and Cromagnon, 
 163 ; near Belfort and of Switzer- 
 land, 141 ; of the Vezere, 139 
 
 CETIOSAURUS, 8(5 
 
 CHALK, nature of, 26 ; pits, 20 ; am- 
 monites and foraminifera in, 27 ; 
 period, 95 ; under the ocean, 29, 99 
 
 " CHALLENGER " expedition, 27 
 
 CHANGES have been gradual, 43 
 
 CISSBURY camp, 134 
 
 CLAY, London, 21, 22 ; and mud, 
 
 33 
 
 CLIMATE, Arctic, and of coal for- 
 mations, 67 
 
 CLUB-MOSSES, 61 
 
 CLOTHING, 138 
 
 COAL beds, 31 ; in Arctic regions, 67 ; 
 plants of the, 63 ; is fossil wood, 
 73 ; is sunlight compressed, 30 
 
 COLORADO, the people in, 142 
 
 COMPRESSED PLANTS, 15 
 
 CONCLUSION, 168 
 
 COOKERY, 137 
 
 CORALS, 78 
 
 CREATION, the plan of, 117 
 
 CRETACEOUS period, 96 
 
 CROMAGNON and Engis, caves of, 
 163 
 
 DAWN of life, 56 ; plant, 59 
 
 DENUDATION, 49, 50 
 
 DINORNIS, specimens of, in British 
 
 Museum, 116 
 DINOSAURUS, 89 
 
 DlNOTHERIUM, 114 
 
 DRAWINGS, pre-historic, 135 
 DWELLINGS and food of men, 137 
 
 EARLY histories, 123 ; plant life, 59 
 EARTH, early history of, i, 2, 3 ; in- 
 terior of, 1 8 ; intense heat of, 24 ; 
 climate of, 48 ; not yet fit for man, 
 75 ; ' foraminifera earth,' 39
 
 172 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 EARTHQUAKES, 18, 19 
 EARTHWORKS of Ohio, 165 
 EASTER island monuments, 164 
 EGYPT, monuments of, 266 
 EODENDRON, 59 
 EOPHYTON, 59 
 EOZOON, 57, 77 
 
 FIRST weapons, 121 
 
 FISH-LIZARDS, 85 
 
 FISHES, fossil, 71 
 
 FLINT, origin of, 14 ; in chalk, 96 ; 
 weapons, where found, 131 ; tool 
 manufactory, 134 
 
 FORAMINIFERA, 2O ; ' foraminifera 
 earth, ' 30 ; drawings of, 97 ; spe- 
 cimens of, in British Museum, 99 
 
 FORESTS under the sea, 75, 76 
 
 FOSSIL, derivation of, 10 ; plants, 
 6 1 ; sunlight, 73 ; footprints, 83 ; 
 human, 157, 159 
 
 FOOD and dwellings, 137 
 
 FOOTPRINTS, fossil, 83 
 
 FLYING reptiles, 89 
 
 GEOLOGICAL part, 17 
 GEOLOGY, derivation of, 19 
 GEYSERS, 54 
 
 GIGANTIC animals, 101 ; birds, 115 
 GLACIERS and icebergs, 47 
 GRANITE, raised, 23 ; appearance 
 
 of, 24 
 
 GRAVEL, &c., 35 
 GREAT IRISH STAG, drawing, &c., 
 
 of, 107 
 GUADALOUPE human fossil, 157 
 
 HEAT of the Earth, 3, 18 
 HEBREW letters, 125 
 HESPERORNIS, 92 
 HIPPOPOTAMUS in England, 105 
 HISTORIES, early, 123 
 HUMAN part, the, 120 ; fossils, 157 
 
 ICE age, 45 ; more than one, 48 
 ICEBERGS and glaciers, 47 
 ICHTHYORNIS, 92 
 ICHTHYOSAURUS, 85 
 IMPLEMENTS, flint and stone, in 
 British Museum, 131 ; bronze, 162 
 INDIA, elephants in, 145 
 
 INSECTS in coal forests, 64 
 
 IRISH stag, 107 
 
 ISLANDS appear and disappear, 39 
 
 JET, 69 
 JURASSIC age, 89 
 
 KANGAROO, fossil, 115 
 KITCHEN middens, 152 
 
 LABYRINTHODON, 2 
 
 LAKE dwellers, 146 ; dwellings in 
 Europe, Africa, Asia, and New 
 Guinea, 149 
 
 LANGUAGE, origin of ; and of pre- 
 historic man, 155 
 
 LAURENTIAN rocks, 57 
 
 LENA river, mammoth found, 102 
 
 LIFE, the dawn of, 56 ; ' life-dawn 
 animal,' 57 
 
 LIGNITE, 69 
 
 LION, English sabre-toothed, 106 
 
 MAMMALIA, 102 
 
 MAMMOTH, 49, 102-3 < bones of, in 
 Siberia, Asia, North America, &c. ; 
 drawing of, on ivory, 135 ; in Es- 
 sex, 104 ; skull of, in British Mu- 
 seum, 104 
 
 MAN and his works, 121 ; his 
 earliest inventions, 122 ; mam- 
 moth, mastodon, reindeer, &c., 
 contemporary with, 116 ; pre-his- 
 toric, 127, 131 ; dwellings and 
 food of, 137 
 
 MARSUPIAL animal, 95 
 
 MASTODON, 102 ; in Europe, Ame- 
 rica, India, &c., 104 ; in Missouri, 
 128 ; skeleton of, in British Mu- 
 seum, 104 
 
 MEGALOSAURUS, 89 
 
 MEGATHERIUM, in South America, 
 no ; drawing of,- 112 ; account of, 
 113 ; skeleton of, in British Mu- 
 seum, 113 
 
 MEXICAN writings, 124 
 
 MIDDENS, kitchen, 152-4 ; makers, 
 life of, 153 
 
 MOA, 115-16 
 
 MONKEYS, fossil, 102 ; at Gibraltar, 
 102
 
 INDEX. 
 
 173 
 
 MONUMENTS of Easter Island, 164 ; 
 
 of Egypt and Assyria, 166 
 MOUNTAINS, burning, and covered 
 
 with snow, 19 
 MORESBY, Captain, in New Guinea, 
 
 NEW GUINEA, stone age of, 143 
 NEW ZEALAND dinornis, 115 ; moa, 
 
 116 ; stone age of, 143 
 NINEVEH and Babylon, ruins, &c., of, 
 
 164, 165 
 NORWAY, raised terraces of, 38 
 
 OHIO, earthworks of, 165 
 OOLITE, 41, 86 
 ORIGIN of language, 155 
 
 PAPYRUS writings, 125 
 
 PARIS, built of shells, 100 
 
 PARTS, the, are called fossils, n 
 
 PAST life, the signs of, 13 
 
 PEAT, 70 
 
 PLAN of creation, 117 
 
 PLANTS of coal forests, 63 
 
 PLESIOSAURUS, 85 
 
 POTTERY, 141, 142 
 
 PRE-HISTORIC art, 133 ; drawings, 
 
 135 ; man, 127, 131 ; weapons and 
 
 tools, 129 
 PTERODACTYL, derivation of, 89 ; 
 
 description of, 90 
 PUZZLE, the framework of, 1-16 ; 
 
 parts of, where found, 5 
 PYRENEES, when raised, roo 
 
 RAiN-drops, marks of, 84 
 REINDEER, drawing of, on slate, 135 
 REPTILES, the age of, 81 
 RHINOCEROS in England, 105 
 
 ROCKS, raising of the ; how placed, 
 21, 25 ; carried by ice, 48 
 
 SANDSTONE, formation of, 25, 26 ; 
 
 Old Red, 62, 8 1 ; New Red, 77 
 SLATE hardened mud, 15 
 SPONGES, 15, 78 
 
 STAR-fish, 78 
 
 STONE age, 128 ; first stone age, 137 ; 
 
 second, 138 ; of New Guinea and 
 
 New Zealand, 143, 145 
 SUBSIDENCE, 37 
 
 SUCCESSION of formations, 41, 42 
 SUCKLERS, 102 
 SUNLIGHT, fossil, 73 
 
 TERTIARY period, 34, 100 
 TIME, the work of, 167 
 TOOLS, polished and rough, 139 
 TRILOBITE, 78 
 
 UPHEAVAL and depression, 36, 38 
 
 VEGETABLE part, the, 56 
 
 VERTEBRATA, 101 
 
 VOLCANOES and earthquakes, 19 
 
 WATER, a powerful tool of Nature, 
 
 34, 45 ; thrown out of the earth, 
 
 54 
 WEAPONS, early, 121 ; and tools, 
 
 where found, 131 
 WHALES, 101 
 WORLD, early history of the, 3, 4 ; 
 
 size and shape, 17 ; materials of, 
 
 17 ; heat of, 18 
 WORK, the, of time, 167 
 WRITING, origin of, 123 ; Mexican 
 
 Egyptian, and Assyrian, 124, 125 ; 
 
 on papyrus, 125 ; by signs, 125 
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 AND 1'ARLIAMENT STREET
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 1 The present little work, which is specially addressed to children, 
 is written in so pleasant and easy a style, and its descriptions of 
 life on the earth are on the whole so simple and accurate, that we 
 can heartily recommend it to the attention of those who seek such 
 a guide. The illustrations are good, and the general appearance of 
 the book such that it may compare most favourably with other 
 primers of geology.' GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 
 
 'Written in clear and simple style, especially attractive to 
 children. It includes an account of pre-historic man, and shows in 
 many other ways that the writer is familiar with some of the 
 latest phases of geological thought.' ACADEMY. 
 
 ' The avowed object of this charming little book is to place the 
 results of these researches within the grasp of children, by presenting 
 
 them in language at once clear, simple, and winning In this 
 
 hard task Mr. NICOLS has succeeded admirably, without resorting 
 to that base subterfuge the attempt to clothe instruction in the 
 
 guise of fiction This is true education, for it teaches children 
 
 first to observe and then to reason Though the style of this 
 
 delightful book is simple and childlike, it is as far as possible 
 removed from being childish.' PALL MALL GAZETTE. 
 
 ' The language is plain, the descriptions are lucid, the illustrations 
 apt, and uie broad facts of the science are very correctly stated. 
 
 The work, too, is free from all attempts at fine writing We 
 
 wish the book success as at any rate an attempt to lay before the 
 young fact instead of fiction.' 
 
 QUARTERLY JOURNAL of SCIENCE. 
 
 ' The book is a successful attempt to explain the simplest facts 
 of geology, and of the succession of life on the earth.' 
 
 WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 
 
 ' The idea is a happy one, and will recommend itself to children ; 
 and we are bound to say that Mr. NICHOLS has carried out his idea 
 remarkably well, and produced a work which will do much to spread 
 sound notions upon the gradual development of our earth and its 
 
 inhabitants to the condition in which we now see them We 
 
 can safely recommend Mr. NICHOL'S little book as one that will 
 have a most beneficial effect in opening the minds of its young 
 readers.' POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW.
 
 OPINIONS of the PRESS continued. 
 
 1 This is a good little book, cleverly written by an able geologist, 
 and well adapted for children. We can recommend the volume as 
 a present to any intelligent boy or girl.' LANCET. 
 
 ' This book appears to be, in style, language, and scope, eminently 
 adapted for its purpose, which is to awaken among the little folks 
 an interest " in the history of life upon the earth," and "give them 
 the taste for more extended study in after years." ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. 
 
 " Though these pages are designed for young persons," says the 
 Author, " other readers, perhaps, who are not familiar with the 
 subject, may find some interest in them, if they are not deterred by 
 the necessarily simple style," which, we venture to say, they most 
 
 assuredly will not be To many grown persons, therefore, as well 
 
 as their descendants, will this book be a great boon, which, if they 
 are at all liberal-minded, they will advocate as well as appreciate. 
 
 Like the Science Primers of Professors Huxley, Roscoe, Balfour 
 
 Stewart, &c., if duly read and weighed, it will tend to unravel and 
 sweep away a deal of baneful superstition.' LAND and WATER. 
 
 ' That Mr. NICOLS has succeeded in the object he proposed to 
 himself may be safely affirmed. He has done his work briefly and 
 lucidly, and has produced a book capable of arresting the attention, 
 not only of children, but of those from whom they receive their 
 earlier lessons.' The COUNTRY. 
 
 ' A perfect " Open Sesame " for young scientific students, and so 
 cleverly composed as to make students of those who are not scientific : 
 not merely the young, but older people too. Mr. NICOLS thoroughly 
 understands his work.' NOTES and QUERIES. 
 
 'Easily and attractively written for young people The treat- 
 ment of so wide a subject, and the condensing it into a volume of 
 150 pages is no light task. We can, however, congratulate Mr. 
 NICOLS upon having accomplished it in so judicious, perhaps, better 
 still, so suggestive a manner ; and we have no doubt that his little 
 book will become a well-worn favourite in the hands of all 
 thoughtful and intelligent children who may be so fortunate as to 
 possess it.' ENGINEER. 
 
 ' The manner in which the pieces of the puzzle fossils are 
 found, put together, and interpreted, is related in language readily 
 understood by children ; the description of the vegetable, animal, 
 and human parts being peculiarly interesting. The illustrations 
 
 are the best of the kind with which we are acquainted We 
 
 strongly recommend it.' SCHOOLMASTER.
 
 OPINIONS of the PRESS continued. 
 
 ' It is the puzzle as to the history of life on the earth unravelled 
 in a manner to interest and enlighten the minds, and to develop 
 
 the observing and reflecting faculties of children The results of 
 
 costly and laborious investigations in many different branches of 
 science are concentrated in these free and easy lessons or colloquial 
 
 lectures to young children Calculated to arouse an interest in 
 
 all but the dullest and most indifferent juvenile minds Will be 
 
 found invaluable to teachers and a great help in the rational cul- 
 tivation of the intelligence of the rising generation.' 
 
 SCHOOL BOARD CHRONICLE. 
 
 ' The statement of these facts, though made with all the sobriety 
 due to a scientific discourse, has all the interest of a story for the 
 young ; and the narrative, if we mistake not, will interest other 
 readers than those for whom it is primarily written. A word of 
 commendation must be given to the illustrations, which are ex- 
 ceedingly well drawn.' EDUCATIONAL TIMES. 
 
 ' To place the " simple truths of science " in rivalry with fairy 
 tales and merry picture-books is not so hopeless as at first sight 
 may seem ; and certainly the simple, attractive style in which the 
 marvels of the physical world are here set out must not only interest, 
 but charm every bright child of eager intellect. Simplicity is 
 observed to the utmost, but it is the simplicity of truth, so that the 
 child is not interested at the expense of having afterwards to un- 
 learn what he has read or listened to.' 
 
 LIVERPOOL WEEKLY ALBION. 
 
 ' Mr. ARTHUR NICOLS has attempted a task which at first sight 
 seems extremely difficult, but which he has successfully achieved. 
 
 Children can scarcely help understanding and being interested 
 
 in the wonderful story of the earth's crust, and of past organic life 
 upon it, which he unfolds. There is nothing childish about his 
 
 style, yet he writes with perfect simplicity A better book to 
 
 put into the hands of thoughtful children, or for use as a text-book 
 by persons engaged in the private tuition of the young, it would 
 be difficult to find.' The SCOTSMAN. 
 
 ' Facts are stranger than any fancies which emanate from the 
 writers of even fairy tales, and when they can be brought home to 
 youthful students by ocular demonstrations the facts are invariably 
 
 preferred to the fancies The illustrations which adorn the book 
 
 are well drawn, and sufficiently numerous for the purpose The 
 
 Author is a genial and reliable guide to a solution of the puzzle of 
 life.' ENGLISH MECHANIC. 
 
 London, LONGMANS & CO.