What was this Dawn Animal like? So far as can be judged from the fossil, it was a very large creature, soft and gelatinous like a jelly-fish.[5] It had a stem by which it was fastened to the bottom of warm, shallow seas. Thus it never moved from its place, but swayed with the moving waters, and perhaps had the power of expanding and contracting itself. Like the mollusks,[6] the Eozoön wanted a house for its delicate body. Therefore, as it swayed to and fro, it collected from the water carbonate of lime, and covered itself with a thin shell or crust. As it continued to grow it continued to cover itself with crust after crust of lime. This lime crust was not a solid mail over Eozoön; it was rather like a fine net or sieve through the pores of which could pass the jelly-like threads or filaments whereby the creature collected lime and food. But here we are led to another discovery. If the Eozoön was a living animal, it must have had food to nourish it, and living creatures feed upon animal or vegetable substances.[7] Therefore in these warm seas there must have been minute animal or vegetable organisms which Eozoön could gather with its long nets or lines, as it grew at the bottom of the sea. Was the Eozoön beautiful? We cannot speak positively; but as we find no age of the world when there was not beauty of form and color, as we see beauty often followed as an end in creation, we may suppose that the Eozoön had gay colors and looked like some great vivid flower waving upon its stem in the water.[8] There are beds of limestone in the Laurentian rocks, which bear indications of former animal life. Also in the Laurentian rocks there are beds of iron ore, and these have been supposed to indicate that there was some vegetation in the Laurentian period. Now as in the Laurentian period the Eozoic age shows us vast beds of iron, graphite, and limestone, we may suppose that there were in the warm waters of that era great beds of eozoön like the coral reefs of to-day. In the deep seas of the present age there are myriads of little creatures called foraminifera; and though we have found no trace of these in the earliest rocks, it may be that the first ocean swarmed with them and that they were then busy building limestone strata just as they are busy now. During the Eozoic age the warm, turbid ocean that nearly covered the globe constantly deposited sediment, and at last the thin earth-crust gave way under the strain and weight upon it. The earth-crust collapsed, or fell in, as a great floor which has been overburdened. We sometimes hear of the floors of large rooms which give way under some heavy strain. If we go to see a place where such an accident has occurred, we shall notice how flooring and timbers do not fall flat, as a whole, but are crushed and crowded together sidewise or edgewise. When the Laurentian continent sank, many of its ranges and beds of rock were bent and tilted in this fashion, and we so find them to-day.