Andrew Crombie Ramsay

“ The occurrence of a few genera or even species of fish and Crustacea common to the salt, brackish, or fresh waters, does not prove that the passage-beds and those still higher are truly marine. At the present day, animals commonly supposed to be essentially marine are occasionally found inhabiting fresh water. In the inland fresh lakes of Newfoundland, seals, which never visit the sea, are common and breed freely. ”

“ I cannot conceive how peroxide of iron could have been deposited from solution in a wide and deep sea by any possible process, but, if carbonate of iron were carried in solution into lakes, it might have been deposited as a peroxide through the oxidizing action of the air and the escape of the carbonic acid that held it in solution. It is well known that ferruginous mud and ores of iron are deposited in the lakes of Sweden at the present day. ”

“ Crystals of common salt were not likely to have been deposited in an open sea, for, to form such crystals, concentration of chloride of sodium by evaporation is necessary. Deposits of gypsum, common in the Permian marls, could also only have been formed in inland waters by concentration, or on occasional surfaces of mud exposed to the sun and air, for no reasonable explanation can be offered of a process by means of which sulphate of lime can be deposited amid common mechanical sediments at the bottom of an open sea. ”

“ Taken as a whole, it seems to me that the nearest conception we can form, of part of the old continent in which the Permian and New Red strata were deposited, is, that it physically resembled the great area of inland drainage of Central Asia, in which, from the Caspian 3,000 miles to the eastward, almost all the lakes are salt in a region comparatively rainless, and in which the area occupied by inland salt or brackish waters was formerly much more extensive than at present. ”

“ It is unnecessary to dilate on the well-known continental aspect of a large part of the Carboniferous strata which succeed the Old Red Sandstone, especially of the Coal-measures, which in the north of England and in Scotland are not confined to the upper parts of the series, but reach down among strata which elsewhere are only represented by the marine beds of the Carboniferous Limestone. ”

“ It is obvious that common pink mud might have been formed from the mechanical waste of red granite, gneiss, or other red rocks in which pink felspars are found, but such felspars are tinted all through with the coloring-matter, and such a tint is very different from the deep-red color that was produced by the encasing of each individual grain of sediment with a thin pellicle of peroxide of iron. ”

“ Pseudo-morphous crystals of salt are common throughout the whole formation, which, besides, contains two great beds of rock-salt, each 80 or 100 feet thick, which could only have been deposited in a lake that had no outflow, and from which all the water poured into it by the rivers of the country was entirely got rid of by evaporation induced by solar heat. ”

“ The faunas of the Cambrian, and especially of the Lower Silurian rocks, from their abundance and variety show that they are far removed from the beginning of life. Looking to the vanishing point in the past and the unknown future, well might Hutton declare that in all that the known rocks tell us "we find no vestige of a beginning—no trace of an end."—Contemporary Review. ”

“ The poverty in number and the frequent small size of the shells in the passage-beds indicate a change of conditions in the nature of the waters in which they lived; and the plants alluded to clearly point to the close neighborhood of a land, of which we have no direct signs, in the vast development of a purely marine fauna in lower portions of the Ludlow strata. ”

“ One shadowy continent still remains unnamed, far older than the oldest of those previously spoken of. What and where was the land from which the thick and wide deposits that form the Silurian strata of Europe were derived? For all sedimentary strata, however thick and extended in area, represent the degradation of an equal amount of older rocks wherewith to form them. ”