Life's Dawn on Earth: Being the history of the oldest known fossil remains, and their relations to geological time and to the development of the animal kingdomDawson, John William, Sir
History
Life's Dawn on Earth: Being the history of the oldest known fossil remains, and their relations to geological time and to the development of the animal kingdom
Dawson, John William, Sir
Life -- Origin; Paleontology -- Precambrian
afford a vast harvest of new forms to the geologists of the present and
coming time. This result will be in entire accordance with what has
taken place before in the history of geological discovery. It is not
very long since the old and semi-metamorphic sediments constituting the
great Silurian and Cambrian systems were massed together in geological
classifications as primitive or primary rocks, destitute or nearly
destitute of organic remains. The brilliant discoveries of Sedgwick,
Murchison, Barrande, and a host of others, have peopled these once
barren regions; and they now stretch before our wondering gaze in
the long vistas of early Palæozoic life. So we now look out from the
Cambrian shore upon the vast ocean of the Huronian and Laurentian,
all to us yet tenantless, except for the few organisms, which, like
stray shells cast upon the beach, or a far-off land dimly seen in the
distance, incite to further researches, and to the exploration of the
unknown treasures that still lie undiscovered. It would be a suitable
culmination of the geological work of the last half-century, and one
within reach at least of our immediate successors, to fill up this
great blank, and to trace back the Primordial life to the stage of
Eozoon, and perhaps even beyond this, to predecessors which may have
existed at the beginning of the Lower Laurentian, when the earliest
sediments of that great formation were laid down. Vast unexplored areas
of Laurentian and Huronian rocks exist in the Old World and the New.
The most ample facilities for microscopic examination of rocks may
now be obtained; and I could wish that one result of the publication
of these pages may be to direct the attention of some of the younger
and more active geologists to these fields of investigation. It is to
be observed also that such regions are among the richest in useful
minerals, and there is no reason why search for these fossils should
not be connected with other and more practically useful researches. On
this subject it will not be out of place to quote the remarks which I
made in one of my earlier papers on the Laurentian fossils:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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