Ere entering upon the subject of
Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time i have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.
Substitute for Fuel on the Prairies.-
Fossil Trees.- Fierceness of the Buffaloes When in Heat.- Three Hunters Missing.- Signal Fires and Smokes.- Uneasiness Concerning the Lost Men.- A Plan to Forestall a Rogue.- New Arrangement With Rose.- Return of the Wanderers.
It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a
fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.
Professor Marsh said those skeletons were
fossils. So that makes me part blue grass and part
fossil; if there is any older or better stock, you will have to look for it among the Four Hundred, I reckon.
It would do you good to walk there and back two or three times a day; besides, are you such a
fossil that you never wish to see a flower or a green leaf?"
The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle includes an account of the
Fossil Mammalia, by Professor Owen; of the Living Mammalia, by Mr.
Hence we ought not to expect at the present time to meet with numerous transitional varieties in each region, though they must have existed there, and may be embedded there in a
fossil condition.
Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old
fossil the Smithsonian Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.
It was now their turn to impose some limit on that selenographic science, which had reconstructed the lunar world as Cuvier did the skeleton of a
fossil, and say, "The moon was this, a habitable world, inhabited before the earth.
But I presently found an antique which was older than either the battered Cathedral or the date assigned to the piece of history; it was a spiral-shaped
fossil as large as the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench, and had been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth.
The neighbourhood of the upper Thames is rich in Roman relics, and my surmise seemed to me a very probable one; but our serious young man, who is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the
fossil of a whale; and he pointed out to us various evidences proving that it must have belonged to the preglacial period.
"In your little room, sir," replied Conseil, "and in your museum, sir; and I should have already classed all your
fossils, sir.