seems chiefly re narkable for its strange forms of the vertebrate animals, exclusively fish. The Upper Old Red formation, so rich in Scotland in the remains of Holoptychius, Platygnathus, Bothriolepis, and their contemporaries, is comparatively barren in England. The middle formation, however, we find mottled with ichthyolitic fragments, representative of the two great orders of fish in which, at this early period, and for long ages. after, all vertebrate existence was comprised. Fragments of the ichthyodorulites of Placoids are not unfrequent; and the occipital plates of the Ganoid Cephalaspides abound. The true fish seems to have overspread and taken full possession of the seas during the deposition of this system, as the Trilobite had taken possession of them in the preceding one. But we hasten on the thick Old Red coils up and away, like a piece of old elastic parchment that had been acquiring for ages the set of the roll; and now the still more ancient Silurian system occupies the entire prospect. In this system the remains of the vertebrate animals first appear, - few and far between, and restricted, so far as is yet known, to its great upper division exclusively. We pass hurriedly downwards. The vertebrata vanish from creation. We have traced the dynasty to its first beginnings; and now an ignobler, though more ancient, race of kings occupy the throne.* We have reached, in our explora * Of course, in all cases in which the evidence is negative, the decision must be given under protest, as not in its nature irreversible, but dependent on whatever positive evidence the course of discovery may yet serve to evolve. In February last (1846), when this chapter was written, no trace of reptiles had been found earlier than the Lower New Red Sandstone, the Permian system of Sir Roderick Murchison. I find, however, from a report of the proceedings of the meeting of the British Association, held last September at Southampton, that Mr. Lyell having examined certain footprints, the discovery of Dr. King, of the United States, which occur in Pennsylvania in the middle of the Coal Measures, he has determined them to be those of a large reptilion. It does seem strange enough that the tions, the dynasty of the crustacea. In all creation, as it exists in this period of dusk antiquity, we see nothing that overtops the Trilobite, with his jointed mail of such exquisite workman prints of this eldest of reptiles should be found so far in advance of what has been long deemed the vanguard of its order, the thecodent Saurians of the Permian, - and this, too, in a system so carefully explored as the Coal Measures; and yet the occurrence is not without a parallel in the geologic scheme. The mammal of the Stonesfield Slate stands as much alone, and still further in advance of its fellows. I do not find that I have anything to alter in my statement regarding the introduction of the fish. In Professor Silliman's American Journal for January 1846, it is stated, that an ichthyodorulite had been just discovered in the Onondago Limestone of New York, and an imperfectly-preserved fish-bone in the Oriskany Sandstone of the same state. There seems, however, to be no reason to conclude from their contemporary organisms, chiefly shells and corals, which closely approximate to those of the Wenlock Limestone, — that either of them belonged to a more ancient fish than the ichthyodorulite described by Mr. Sedgwick, to which I have already had occasion to refer. It seems not unworthy of remark, that while among the fish of the Old Red Sandstone considerably more than three-fourths of the species, and greatly more than nineteen-twentieths of the individuals, are of the Ganoid order, all the fish of the Silurian system yet discovered are Placoids. [The statement here regarding the absence of fish in the Lower Silurian, which I retain in a second edition, as it may serve to indicate the onward march of geological science, was in accordance, only a few months ago, when the first edition of this work appeared, with what was known of the more ancient rocks and their fossils. But it also illustrates, like my statement respecting the reptiles of the Permian, the unsolid character of negative evidence, when made the basis of positive assertion. It is now determined that the Lower, like the Upper Silurian, has its fish. "Alas for one of my generalizations, founded on negative evidence, on which you build!" says Sir Roderick Murchison, in a communication which I owe to his kindness. "The Lower Silurian is no longer to be viewed as an invertebrate period; for the Onchus (species not yet decided) has been found in Llandeilo Flags, and in the Lower Silurian Rocks of Bala. In one respect I am gratified by the discovery; for the form is so very like that of the Onchus Murchisoni of the Ludlow Rocks, that it is clear the Silurian system is one great natural-history series, as proved, indeed, by all its other organic remains."- Second Edition.] ship, and his prominent eye of many facets, that so capriciously refuses to admit the light through more or less than just its four hundred and ten spherical lenses. The Cephalopoda, indeed, may have held with him a divided empire; but the Brachiopoda, the Pteropoda, the Gasteropoda, and the Acephala, must have been unresisting subjects, and all must have been implicit deference among the Crinoidea, the Pennularia, the Corals, and the Sponges. As we sink lower and lower, the mine of organic existence waxes unproductive and poor: a few shells now and then appear, a few graptolites, a few sponges. Anon we reach the outer limits of life: a void and formless desert stretches beyond, and dark night comes down upon the landscape. - CHAPTER XIII. Birmingham; incessant Clamor of the Place. -Toy-shop of Britain; Se rious Character of the Games in which its Toys are chiefly employed. Museum. Liberality of the Scientific English. - Musical Genius of Birmingham. - Theory. - Controversy with the Yorkers. - Anec dote. The English Language spoken very variously by the English; in most cases spoken very ill. - English Type of Person. - Attend a Puseyite Chapel. - Puseyism a feeble Imitation of Popery. - Popish Cathedral. Popery the true Resting-place of the Puseyite. - Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Puseyite Principle; its purposed Object not attained; Hostility to Science. - English Funerals. THE sun had set ere I entered Birmingham through a long low suburb, in which all the houses seem to have been built during the last twenty years. Particularly tame-looking houses they are; and I had begun to lower my expectations to the level of a flat, mediocre, three-mile city of brick, a sort of manufactory in general, with offices attached,-when the coach drove up through New-street, and I caught a glimpse of the Town Hall, a noble building of Anglesea marble, of which Athens in its best days might not have been ashamed. The whole street is a fine one. I saw the lamps lighting up under a stately new edifice, the Grammar School of King Edward the Sixth, which, like most recent erections of any pretension, either in England or among ourselves, bears the mediæval stamp: still further on I could descry, through the darkening twilight, a Roman-looking building that rises over the market-place; and so I inferred that the humble brick of Birmingham, singularly abundant, doubtless, and widely spread, represents merely the business necessities of the place; and that, when on any occasion its taste comes to be displayed, it proves to be a not worse taste than that shown by its neighbors. What first struck my ear as peculiar among the noises of a large town, and their amount here is singularly great, was what seemed to be somewhat irregular platoon-firing, carried on, volley after volley, with the most persistent deliberation. The sounds came, I was told, from the "proofing-house," an iron-lined building, in which the gunsmith tests his musket-barrels, by giving them a quadruple charge of powder and ball, and then, after ranging them in a row, firing them from outside the apartment by means of a train. Birmingham produces on the average a musket per minute, night and day, throughout the year: it, besides, furnishes the army with its swords, the navy with its cutlasses and pistols, and the busy writers of the day with their steel pens by the hundredweight and the ton; and thus it labors to deserve its name of the "Great Toy-shop of Britain," by fashioning toys in abundance for the two most serious games of the day,—the game of war and the game of opinion-making. On the morrow I visited several points of interest connected with the place and its vicinity. I found at the New Cemetery, on the north-western side of the town, where a party of Irish laborers were engaged in cutting deep into the hill-side, a good section, for about forty feet, of the Lower New Red Sandstone; but its only organisms-carbonized leaves and stems, by much too obscure for recognition told no distinct story; and so incoherent is the enclosing sandstone matrix, that the laborers dug into it with their mattocks as if it were a bank of clay. I glanced over the Geological Museum attached to the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, and found it, though sinall, beautifully kept and scientifically arranged. It has its few specimens of New Red Sandstone fossils, chiefly Posidonomya, |