Slender as our knowledge is of the earlier evolution of the Invertebrate
animals, we return to our Cambrian population with greater interest.
The uncouth Trilobite and its livelier cousins, the sluggish, skulking
Brachiopod and Mollusc, the squirming Annelids, and the plant-like
Cystids, Corals, and Sponges are the outcome of millions of years of
struggle. Just as men, when their culture and their warfare advanced,
clothed themselves with armour, and the most completely mailed
survived the battle, so, generation after generation, the thicker and
harder-skinned animals survived in the Archaean battlefield, and the
Cambrian age opened upon the various fashions of armour that we there
described. But, although half the story of life is over, organisation
is still imperfect and sluggish. We have now to see how it advances to
higher levels, and how the drama is transferred from the ocean to a new
and more stimulating environment.
The Cambrian age begins with a vigorous move on the part of the land.
The seas roll back from the shores of the "lost Atlantis," and vast
regions are laid bare to the sun and the rains. In the bays and hollows
of the distant shores the animal survivors of the great upheaval adapt
themselves to their fresh homes and continue the struggle. But the
rivers and the waves are at work once more upon the land, and, as the
Cambrian age proceeds, the fringes of the continents are sheared, and
the shore-life steadily advances upon the low-lying land. By the end of
the Cambrian age a very large proportion of the land is covered with
a shallow sea, in which the debris of its surface is deposited. The
levelling continues through the next (Ordovician) period. Before its
close nearly the whole of the United States and the greater part of
Canada are under water, and the new land that had appeared on the site
of Europe is also for the most part submerged. The present British Isles
are almost reduced to a strip of north-eastern Ireland, the northern
extremity of Scotland, and large islands in the south-west and centre of
England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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