There are not a few persons still to be met with, who believe that man and the lower animals appeared simultaneously upon the face of the earth. Geology most forcibly proves the error of such an idea, for although the fossilized remains of every other class of organized beings have been discovered, human bones have nowhere been found. This fact, though deeply interesting, is perhaps not more so than many others which this wonderful science has unfolded. What can be more startling to the student for instance, than the information that for a long period, it may be thousands of years, no species of fish whatever inhabited the primeval seas? True it is that certain creatures occupied the shallows and depths of ocean, but these were of the lowest type. The most conspicuous were the coral polypes, which even then as now were ever industriously building up lasting monuments of their existence, as the Trilobites, a group of Crustacea, and the Crinoids, or Lily-stars. The last-mentioned group of animals were analogous to the present tribe of Star-fishes, and are now nearly extinct. The body of the Lily-star, which resembled some beautiful radiate flower, was affixed to a long, slender stalk, composed of a series of solid plates superposed upon one another, bound together by a fleshy coat, and made to undulate to and fro in any direction at the will of the animal. The stalk was firmly attached to some foreign substance, and consequently the Crinoid Star-fish, unlike its modern representative, could not rove about in search of prey, but only capture such objects as came within reach of its widely expanded arms. 'Scarcely a dozen kinds of these beautiful creatures,' observes Professor Forbes, 'now live in the seas of our globe, and individuals of these kinds are comparatively rarely to be met with; formerly they were among the most numerous of the ocean's inhabitants,--so numerous that the remains of their skeletons constitute great tracts of the dry land as it now appears. For miles and miles we may walk over the stony fragments of the Crinoidae, fragments which were once built up in animated forms, encased in living flesh, and obeying the will of creatures among the loveliest of the inhabitants of the ocean. Even in their present disjointed and petrified state, they excite the admiration not only of the naturalist, but of the common gazer; and the name of stone lily, popularly applied to them, indicates a popular appreciation of their beauty.' Each wheel-like joint of the fossil Encrinite being generally perforated in the centre, facility is thus afforded for stringing a number of these objects together like beads, and in this form the monks of old, according to tradition, used the broken fragments of the lily-stars as rosaries. Hence the common appellation of St Cuthbert's Beads, to which Sir Walter Scott alludes,-- 'On a rock by Lindisfarn St. Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame The sea-born beads that bear his name.'