One of the most interesting aspects of microscopic study is that in which it reveals the intimate structure of objects, which to the unassisted eye appear simple or nearly so, but which prove, by the aid of magnifying power, to be complex.
News
Holy Barnacles
You cannot have wandered among the rocks on our southern or western coasts, when the tide is out, without having observed that their whole surface, up to a certain level (often very precisely defined), is roughened with an innumerable multiude of little brownish cones. If you have ever thought it worth while to examine them with more care, you have seen that, crowded as they are, so thickly that frequently they crush each other out of their proper form and proportions, they are all constructed on the same model.
Microscopic Reveries
Just take your seat in front of this tank, and with a lens before your eye watch the colony. Wander amidst the innumerable multitude of little brownish cones. The most minute crustacean that hops above the retiring wave, or the most fragile shell that lies upon the shingle, there is the indelible impress of the mind and hand of God.
Omphalos
The principal animal, whose foot-prints have been identified, was an enormous Frog (Labyrinthodon), as big as a hippopotamus, but apparently allied, in its serried teeth, and in the bony plates with which[Pg 58] it was covered, to the Crocodiles, which were its associates.
It is curious that marks in the same material have chronicled the serpentine trail of a Sea-worm, the scratchings of a Crab, the ripple of the wavelets, and even the drops of a passing shower; the last revealing, by their margins, the direction of the wind by which the slanting rain was driven.
If the Triassic formations display but little evidence of organic existence, the lack is supplied by the abundance of such records, which is contained in the Oolitic system, and specially in its lowest component,—the Lias. Animals now existed in profusion, but of species which were for the most part peculiar. The coral-making Polypes existed not (or very rarely) in the seas of that age, but lime was secreted by an unusual number of Crinoid Echinoderms, which seem to have fringed the rocks and floating pieces of timber, much as Barnacles do now.
Among the Mollusca now began to appear the inhabitants of those very elegant shells, the Ammonites, allied to the Nautilus of our Southern seas, which may be considered as the lingering representative of those swarms of shelled Cephalopoda. They were accompanied by their near[Pg 59] relations, the Belemnites, more resembling a Cuttle, with a long internal, pointed shell.
Fishes, chiefly belonging to a curiously armed tribe of Sharks, together with some enclosed in bony-mail like pavement, were present in the shallows, where the Lias was probably deposited.