This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 edition. Excerpt: ...in each group by different species; they have yielded insects of many orders, and the fruits of several plants; and lastly, they contain "dirt-beds," or old terrestrial surfaces and soils at different levels, in some of which erect trunks and stumps of cycads and conifers, with their roots still ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 edition. Excerpt: ...in each group by different species; they have yielded insects of many orders, and the fruits of several plants; and lastly, they contain "dirt-beds," or old terrestrial surfaces and soils at different levels, in some of which erect trunks and stumps of cycads and conifers, with their roots still attached to them, are preserved. Yet when the geologist inquires if any land-animals of a higher grade than reptiles lived during any one of these three periods, the rocks are all silent, save one thin layer a few inches in thickness; and this single page of the earth's history has suddenly revealed to us in a few weeks the memorials of so many species of fossil mammalia, that they already outnumber those of many a subdivision of the tertiary series, and far surpass those of all the other secondary rocks put together! Next anterior in age to the Purbeck mammalia are those of the Lower Oolite at Stonesfield, to be mentioned at page 404. These are all very small, comprising four species, three of which are certainly marsupial, and the other possibly placental, but so unlike any living type that some doubts are entertained as to whether it may not have been marsupial. Still older than the above are some fossil quadrupeds, also of small size, found in the Upper Trias of Stuttgardt, in Germany, and more lately by Messrs. Charles Moore and W. Boyd Dawkins, in beds of corresponding age in Somersetshire, which are also of a very low grade, like the living Myrmecobius of Australia. If the three localities where the most ancient mammalia have been found--Purbeck, Stonesfield, and Stuttgardt--had belonged all of them to formations of the same age, we might well have imagined so limited an area to have been peopled exclusively with pouched...
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