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
The limestone is here highly inclined and much contorted, and in all
the excavations a thickness of about 100 feet of it may be exposed.
It is white and crystalline, varying much however in coarseness in
different bands. It is in some layers pure and white, in others it
is traversed by many gray layers of gneissose and other matter, or
by irregular bands and nodules of pyroxene and serpentine, and it
contains subordinate beds of dolomite. In one layer only, and this
but a few feet thick, does the Eozoon occur in any abundance in a
perfect state, though fragments and imperfectly preserved specimens
abound in other parts of the bed. It is a great mistake to suppose
that it constitutes whole beds of rock in an uninterrupted mass.
Its true mode of occurrence is best seen on the weathered surfaces
of the rock, where the serpentinous specimens project in irregular
patches of various sizes, sometimes twisted by the contortion of the
beds, but often too small to suffer in this way. On such surfaces
the projecting patches of the fossil exhibit laminæ of serpentine so
precisely like the _Stromatoporæ_ of the Silurian rocks, that any
collector would pounce upon them at once as fossils. In some places
these small weathered specimens can be easily chipped off from the
crumbling surface of the limestone; and it is perhaps to be regretted
that they have not been more extensively shown to palæontologists, with
the cut slices which to many of them are so problematical. One of the
original specimens, brought from the Calumet, and now in the Museum
of the Geological Survey of Canada, was of this kind, and much finer
specimens from Côte St. Pierre are now in that collection and in my
own. A very fine example is represented, on a reduced scale, in Plate
III., which is taken from an original photograph.[C] In some of the
layers are found other and more minute fossils than Eozoon, and these,
together with its fragmental remains, as ingredients in the limestone,
will be discussed in the sequel. We may merely notice here that the
most abundant layer of Eozoon at this place, occurs near the base of
the great limestone band, and that the upper layers in so far as seen
are less rich in it. Further, there is no necessary connection between
Eozoon and the occurrence of serpentine, for there are many layers
full of bands and lenticular masses of that mineral without any Eozoon
except occasional fragments, while the fossil is sometimes partially
mineralized with pyroxene, dolomite, or common limestone. The section
in fig. 5 will serve to show the attitude of the limestone at this
place, while the more general section, fig. 3, taken from Sir William
Logan, shows its relation to the other Laurentian rocks, and the sketch
in fig. 6 shows its appearance as a feature on the surface of the
country.
[Footnote C: By Mr. Weston, of the Geological Survey of Canada.]
NOTES TO CHAPTER II.
(A.) Sir William E. Logan on the Laurentian System.
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