Ordovician

“ The remains of marine organisms are abundant and varied. Graptolites flourished as in the preceding period, but the forms characteristic of the Ordovician gave place early in the Silurian to the single-axis type (Monograptidae) which prevailed until the close of the period (Rastrites, Monograptus, Retiolites and Cyrtograptus) . As in the Ordovician rocks, the graptolites have been largely employed as zonal indicators. Trilobites were important; the genera Calymene, Phacops and Encrinurus attained their maximum development ”

“ In the Ordovician district, which extends from the southern boundary to the Ceiriog, the Llandeilo formation of the eastern slopes of the Berwyn and the Bala beds of shelly sandstone are traversed east and west by bands of intrusive felspathic porphyry and ashes. ”

“ Unlike the Ordovician period, the Silurian closed without any mountain-making disturbance or great uplift of land. The Silurian period, like the preceding Ordovician and Cambrian, seems to have been free from any more than slight igneous activity as, for example, in Maine and New Brunswick. The total thickness of Silurian strata in North America is seldom more than a few thousand feet. ”

“ Ordovician outcrops are present in the Llano uplift of central Texas and in the Marathon, Solitario, El Paso, and Van Horn regions of Trans-Pecos Texas. These are sedimentary rocks and consist largely of sandstones, cherts, limestones, and dolomites.
Although some of the Ordovician formations are fossiliferous, they are seldom collected by amateur paleontologists because they are exposed in relatively inaccessible places and the fossils are usually poorly preserved. Ordovician fossils reported from Texas include sponges, corals, brachiopods, gastropods, cephalopods, and trilobites. ”

“ The vast shallow waters provide a greatly enlarged theatre for the life of the time, and it flourishes enormously. Then, at the end of the Ordovician, the land begins to rise once more. Whether it was due to a fresh shrinking of the crust, or to the simple process we have described, or both, we need not attempt to determine; but both in Europe and America there is a great emergence of land. The shore-tracts and the shallow water are narrowed, the struggle is intensified in them, and we pass into the Silurian age with a greatly reduced number but more advanced variety of animals. ”

“ The extent of the Ordovician will probably be increased by addition of areas, which cannot yet be separated from the Silurian. The Silurian system is the best-known constituent of the Lower Palaeozoic foundation of New South Wales. The rocks consist of sandstones, quartzites, slates and shales, associated with lenticular masses of limestone. The typical Silurian rocks are richly fossiliferous, the shales containing trilobites, the sandstones many brachiopods, and the limestones a rich coral and bryozoan fauna. There are also beds of chert, which are largely composed of radiolaria. ”

“ The change in organisms throughout geologic time has been a progressive change. In the earliest ages the only animals and plants on the earth were lowly forms, simple and generalized in structure; while succeeding ages have been characterized by the introduction of types more and more specialized and complex, and therefore of higher rank in the scale of being. Thus the Algonkian contains the remains of only the humblest forms of the invertebrates. In the Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian the invertebrates were represented in all their subkingdoms by a varied fauna. ”

“ W. Australia.
Stromatoporella eifeliensis, Nich. Devonian: W. Australia.
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Dictyonema pulchella, T. S. Hall. Lower Ordovician: Victoria.
Ptilograptus sp. L. Ordovician: Victoria.
Callograptus sp. Lower Ordovician: Victoria.
GRAPTOLITES.
Bryograptus victoriae, T. S. Hall. Lower Ordovician (Lancefield Series) : Victoria.
Tetragraptus fruticosus, J. Hall. L. Ordovician (Bendigo Series) : Victoria.
Didymograptus caduceus, Salter. L. Ordovician (Castlemaine Series) : Victoria. Also New Zealand.
Didymograptus bifidus, J. Hall. L. Ordovician (Castlemaine Series) : Victoria. Also New Zealand. ”

“ Dawn was breaking, the mists were rolling up, the hills loomed gigantic in the half-light, studded with granite escarpments, patchworked with clumps of gorse, thorn and bracken—his battlefield.
Ortho had gone again, gone singing to try his fortune in the great world among foreign multitudes. For him the dour grapple with the wilderness—and he was glad of it. He disliked foreigners, disliked taking chances. Here was something definite, something to lock his teeth in, something to be subdued by sheer dogged tenacity. He broke the news that Ortho had gone gypsying again that evening at supper. ”

“ But, though supported by the favor of the king and the display of splendid armor, Ordgar’s treachery had its just reward. Virtue triumphed, and vice was punished. Even while treacherously endeavoring (after being once disarmed) to stab the brave Godwine with a knife which he had concealed in his boot, the false Sir Ordgar was overcome, confessed the falsehood of his charge against Edgar the Atheling and Edith his niece, and, as the quaint old record has it, “The strength of his grief and the multitude of his wounds drove out his impious soul.” ”

“ The time to see this landscape is at sunrise; and the traveller should take his stand upon the rising ground over which the Roman road is carried from the town—the point, in fact, which Turner has selected for his vague and misty sketch of Orvieto in our Gallery. Thence he will command the whole space of the plain, the Apennines, and the river creeping in a straight line at the base; while the sun, rising to his right, will slant along the mountain flanks, and gild the leaden stream, and flood the castled crags of Orvieto with a haze of light. ”

“ Some of Ordulph's huge bones may be seen to-day in a chest in Tavistock church, to which place they were taken when his gigantic coffin was discovered beneath the abbey ruins many years ago.
As the old stories go, Ordulph used at times to amuse himself by standing with one foot on either side of the River Tavy, having previously ordered his men to organise a great drive of wild beasts from the Dartmoor forests above the town. The animals he caused to be driven between his legs, while he, stooping down, would slay them with a small knife, striking their heads off into the running stream. ”

“ Ordonio. A tender-hearted, scrupulous, grateful villain,
Whom I will strangle!
Valdez. While his two companions—— 135
Ordonio. Dead! dead already! what care we for the dead?
Valdez (to Teresa) . Pity him! soothe him! disenchant his spirit!
[857] These supernatural shews, this strange disclosure,
And this too fond affection, which still broods
O'er Alvar's fate, and still burns to avenge it— 140
These, struggling with his hopeless love for you,
Distemper him, and give reality
To the creatures of his fancy.
Ordonio. Is it so?
Yes! yes! ”

“ They fight, Ordonio disarms Isidore, and in disarming him throws his sword up that recess opposite to which they were standing. Isidore hurries into the recess with his torch, Ordonio follows him; a loud cry of 'Traitor! Monster!' is heard from the cavern, and in a moment Ordonio returns alone.
Ordonio. I have hurl'd him down the chasm! treason for treason.
He dreamt of it: henceforward let him sleep,
A dreamless sleep, from which no wife can wake him. ”

“ Ordonio. Well?
Isidore. I was in the act
Of falling down that chasm, when Alhadra
Wak'd me: she heard my heart beat.
Ordonio. Strange enough!
Had you been here before?
Isidore. Never, my lord!
But mine eyes do not see it now more clearly, 80
Than in my dream I saw—that very chasm.
Ordonio (after a pause) . I know not why it should be! yet it is—
Isidore. What is, my lord?
Ordonio. Abhorrent from our nature
To kill a man.—
Isidore. ”

“ Behind us, and stretching for miles in either direction, was the great forest we had been traversing; the old Ardennes had been a forest in the times of Caesar, its narrow pathways echoing to the tread of Roman legions. In front was a richly cultivated plain, undulating gently towards the Meuse, whose silver current wound round it like a garter—the opposite bank being formed by an abrupt wall of naked rocks of grey granite, sparkling with its brilliant hues, and shining doubly in the calm stream at its foot. ”

“ The Visigoths broke into Italy, then, as we are told, passed into southern France; other confused barbarians came and went, and then the Ostrogoths, with Theodoric at their head, an excellent but not very numerous folk. They stayed in Italy, and fought and died, or lived on, changing into indistinguishable Italians, save for flashes of yellow hair, appearing and reappearing where the Goths had lived. And then the Lombards, crueller than the Goths, but better able to maintain their energies effective. ”

“ Ortogrul looked, and saw a torrent tumbling down the rocks, roaring with the noise of thunder, and scattering its foam on the impending woods. “Now,” said his father, “behold the valley that lies between the hills.” Ortogrul looked, and espied a little well, out of which issued a small rivulet. “Tell me now,” said his father, “dost thou wish for sudden affluence, that may pour upon thee like the mountain torrent, or for a slow and gradual increase, resembling the rill gliding from the well?” “Let me be quickly rich,” said Ortogrul; “let the golden stream be quick and violent.” ”

“ The Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) were conquered by this savage horde. The Visigoths (Western Goths) , stricken with mortal fear, hurried to the Danube and implored the Romans to save them from annihilation. For many miles along the banks of the river extended the panic-stricken multitude, with outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations, praying for permission to cross. If settled on the waste lands of Thrace they would pledge themselves to be faithful subjects of Rome, to obey its laws and guard its limits. ”

“ Ordonio runs upon Alvar with his sword. Teresa flings herself on Ordonio and arrests his arm.
Stop, madman, stop!
Alvar. Does then this thin disguise impenetrably
Hide Alvar from thee? Toil and painful wounds
And long imprisonment in unwholesome dungeons,
Have marred perhaps all trait and lineament 200
Of what I was! But chiefly, chiefly, brother,
My anguish for thy guilt!
Ordonio—Brother!
Nay, nay, thou shalt embrace me.
Ordonio (drawing back, and gazing at Alvar) . Touch me not!
Touch not pollution, Alvar! I will die. ”

“ We came to Orvieto by rail and scaled her precipice on the funicular, which connects the station down on the plain with the city on the rock above. If we had come by road, only a toilsome climb of several [319] miles would have brought us to the grim Porta Maggiore, where Boniface VIII., in his twofold tiara, keeps watch from his niche above the gateway.
Does any city frown so fiercely on the traveller as Orvieto? The arch is gloomy and the road within is dark and steep. ”

“ Ordham almost laughed outright as he realized how they yearned to say, “My lord.” He wished to God they could. There was no affected philosophy about Ordham. He longed as ardently to be a peer of the realm as he did for the income of the estates. But after he had convinced them that they had barely left his thoughts during the years of his exile, he added wistfully that he was glad to see the old place again and wished that death might have spared his father. ”

“ The residence of the Odrysians properly so called, and of the princes of that tribe now ruling over so many of the remaining tribes, appears to have been about twelve days’ journey inland from Byzantium, [362] in the upper regions of the Hebrus and Strymon, south of Mount Hæmus, and northeast of Rhodopê. ”

“ As Ordham wandered about, staring at the castles from all sides, or lying on the turf under the trees of the forest, his solitude broken only by a passing peasant in the picturesque grey and green costume of the Highlands, or the sudden appearance of a chamois at the end of a vista, he understood something of Ludwig’s contempt for mere mortals. He loitered on in the groves sacred to the unhappiest man the modern world has seen, many moods sweeping over him, but finally he lay dreaming idly ”

“ THE OSTROGOTHS UNDER THEODORIC The kingdom which Odoacer established on Italian soil did not long endure. It was soon overthrown by the Ostrogoths. At the time of the "fall" of Rome in 476 A.D. they occupied a district south of the middle Danube, which the government at Constantinople had hired them to defend. The Ostrogoths proved to be expensive and dangerous allies. When, therefore, their chieftain, Theodoric, offered to lead his people into Italy and against Odoacer, the Roman emperor gladly sanctioned the undertaking. ”

“ Lacking the austerity of his predecessor, Odon—the great reformer whose energies had given new life to the Benedictine order—Saint Odilon, this "dernier et le plus méprisable des frères de Cluny," as he styled himself, though short and thin in person, was, at the same time, robust and virile; a humble, grave, sympathetic, fatherly man, whose pale face could flush with anger, and his gentle voice become terrible in rebuke of wrong-doing; one whom the sins and sorrows of the living and the dead [74] touched to the heart, as attested by the many healings with which legend has credited his name. ”

“ Always working for the good of his people, he translated the geographical work of Orosius for their benefit, inserting his own priceless additions and comments. Among them is the narrative of an Arctic voyage obtained at first hand from a native of that Halgoland whence Udröst was sometimes visible on the horizon. The explorer, named Ohthere, came to Alfred’s court to tell his story, and so it was saved from oblivion by being inserted in the King’s edition of Orosius. King Alfred describes Ohthere as a very wealthy man, owning 600 reindeer, horned cattle, sheep, and swine ”