Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/89

to which it is attached, just as the handle of a shovel, stuck half a foot into the earth, at the part where the hand grasps it, would elevate the blade over the surface, or as the stem of a tulip elevates the flower over the soil. A community of Lingulæ must resemble, in their deep-sea haunts, a group of Lilliputian shovels, reversed by the laborers to indicate their work completed, or a bed of half-folded tulips, raised on stiff, dingy stems, and exhibiting flattened petals of delicate green. I am not aware that any trace of the cartilaginous foot-stalk has been yet detected in fossil Lingulæ;—like those of this quarry they are mere shovel-blades divested of the handles: but in all that survives of them, or could be expected to survive,—the calcareous portion,—they are identical in type with the living mollusc of the Moluccas. What most strikes in the globe-shaped terebratula, their contemporary, is the singularly antique character of the ventral margin: it seems moulded in the extreme of an ancient fashion, long since gone out. Instead of running continuously round in one plane, like the margins of our existing cockle, venus, or mactra, so as to form, when the valves are shut, a rectilinear line of division, it presents in the centre a huge dovetail, so that the lower valve exhibits in its middle front a square gateway, which we see occupied, when the mouth is closed, by a portcullis-like projection, dependent from the margin of the upper valve. Margins of this antique form characterize some of the terebratulæ of even the Chalk, and the spirifers of the Carboniferous Limestone; but in none of the comparatively modern shells is the square portcullis-shaped indentation so strongly indicated as in the Terebratula Wilsoni. I picked up several other fossils in the quarr:y the Orthis orbicularis and Orthis lunata; the Atrypa affinis; several ill-preserved portions of orthoceratite, belonging chiefly, so far as their state of keeping enabled me