We Englishmen are proud
to have an ancestor who was present at the Battle of Hastings. The
ancestors of Terebratulina caput serpentis may have been present at a
battle of Ichthyosauria in that part of the sea which, when the chalk
was forming, flowed over the site of Hastings. While all around has
changed, this Terebratulina has peacefully propagated its species from
generation to generation, and stands to this day, as a living testimony
to the continuity of the present with the past history of the globe.
Up to this moment I have stated, so far as I know, nothing but
well-authenticated facts, and the immediate conclusions which they force
upon the mind.
But the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts
and immediate causes, but seeks always after a knowledge of the remoter
links in the chain of causation.
Taking the many changes of any given spot of the earth's surface, from
sea to land and from land to sea, as an established fact, we cannot
refrain from asking ourselves how these changes have occurred. And when
we have explained them--as they must be explained--by the alternate slow
movements of elevation and depression which have affected the crust of
the earth, we go still further back, and ask, Why these movements?
I am not certain that any one can give you a satisfactory answer to that
question.
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