alone contain 128. Next in abundance to them were the Belemnites-vulgarly called "Thunder-bolts above mentioned. The Lias strata of Great Britain have yielded 105 species, the British beds alone having produced 57 of them. The Brachiopods, or "Lamp-shells," which were so abundant during the Silurian and Carboniferous periods, were much more scantily developed in Liassic times. Here you see the last of the genus Spirifer. On the Fig. 63.

other hand, the true conchiferous species, which had lain in the background during the earlier epochs of our planets' history, now began to assert that supremacy which they still hold in even a greater degree. No fewer than 625 species of Conchifera have been found in the European Liassic deposits alone. The commonest among these were the species of Gryphæa-a kind of curved fossil oyster, whose abundance sometimes makes up entire beds of limestone. The

Fig. 64.

Hippodium, Plagiostoma, and Avicula are also very common. Of brachiopodus shells, including such familiar types as Rhynchonella, Terebratula, &c., there are as many as 115 species peculiar to the Lias strata of Europe. Taking the summary of fossils which have been found in the strata of this age in Britain, including plants, insects, shells, and vertebrata generally, there are no fewer than 1228 species known to science. This, of course, is not all; for the list of known species has been more than doubled within the last twenty years. It belongs to the science of the future to develop the fauna and flora of each period of the past, but I am firmly convinced that its efforts will be only to prove the continuity of the great Life-scheme, whose broken fragments are enclosed in the rocks. And yet, broken and shattered though they be, they are capable of being so put together that man-the last and highest link of the series-is able to spell out the grand plan of Creation, and to turn with mingled feelings of awe and admiration towards its Great Designer!

Liassic "Thunder

bolt" (Belemnites hastata).

L

CHAPTER IX.

WHAT A PIECE OF PURBECK MARBLE HAD TO SAY!

"Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
"But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say
The solid earth whereon we tread

"In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man."

*

"On the pavement lay

In Memoriam.

Carved stones of the abbey-ruin in the park,
Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time."

The Princess.

HERE are few of my intelligent hearers who are not acquainted with the peculiarities of my appearance. In this civi

lized country, where old churches abound, I may have formed a portion of the fonts in which they were christened, or the pillars of the Early English doorway by which they will be carried to receive the last sacerdotal rites. As a slab near the