Quite accidentally a new light broke upon these unpromising rocks. My friend, Dr. Harrington, strolling one day on the shore, sat down to rest on a stone, and picked up a piece of black slate lying at his feet. He noticed on it some faintly traced lines which seemed peculiar. He put it in his pocket and showed it to me. On examination with a lens it proved to have on it a few spicules of a hexactinellid sponge--little crosses forming a sort of mesh or lattice-work similar to that which Salter had many years before found in the Cambrian rocks of Wales, and had named _Protospongia_--the first sponge. The discovery seemed worth following up, and we took an early opportunity of proceeding to the place, where, after some search, we succeeded in tracing the loose pieces to a ledge of shale on the beach, where there was a little band, only about an inch thick, stored with remains of sponges, a small bivalve shell and a slender branching seaweed. This was one small layer in reefs of slate more than one hundred feet thick. We subsequently found two other thin layers, but less productive. Tools and workmen were procured, and we proceeded to quarry in the reef, taking out at low tide as large slabs as possible of the most productive layer, and carefully splitting these up. The results, as published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada,[17] show more than twelve species of siliceous sponges belonging to six genera, besides fragments indicating other species, and all of these living at one time on a very limited space of what is practically a single surface of muddy sea-bottom.[18] The specimens show the parts of these ancient sponges much more perfectly than they were previously known, and indeed, enable many of them to be perfectly restored. They for the first time connect the modern siliceous sponges of the deep sea with those that flourished on the old sea-bottom of the early Cambro-Silurian, and thus bridge over a great, gap in the history of this low form of life, showing that the principles of construction embodied in the remarkable and beautiful siliceous sponges, like Euplectella, the "Venus flower-basket," now dredged from the deep sea, were already perfectly carried out in this far-back beginning of life. This little discovery further indicates that portions of the older Palæozoic sea-bottoms were as well stored with a varied sponge life as those of any part of the modern ocean. I figure[19] a number of species, remains of all of which may be gathered from a few yards of a single surface at Little Metis. The multitude of interesting details embodied in all this it is impossible to enter into here, but may be judged of from the forms reproduced. These examples tend to show that the imperfection of the record may not depend on the record itself, but on the incompleteness of our work. We must make large allowance for imperfect collecting, and especially for the too prevalent habit of