The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1874-11-07 00:00:00

DR. CARPENTER ON GEOLOGY.

In the theatre of the Birkbeck Institution, London,
last Saturday evening, and before an audience that
crowded the buildhig in every part, Dr. Carpenter gave
the second of a series of twelve lectures on geology,
which are provided by the trustees of the British
Museum, free to the public. The main purpose of
the lecture was to discredit the old geological hypo-
thesis of violent convulsion, and to prove that there
I. has been ccntinuity of life on the globe from the oldest
times to the present, and that where any gap ap-
peared to exist in the succession, a change in the
continuity of strata, that change was simply a local
one, and that continuity would be found to be com-
plete in other parts of the globe. He began by
commenting on the interesting feature in the in-
terests of geological Science, that the little island
Great Britain—which was the home of the study—
presented an epitome of the whole geological succession
of strata. Referring to a table of the strata in
their regular order, be said that there was scarcely a
rock in that or any part of the world which had not its
equivalent here. In Russia, on the other hand, there
was nothing later than the equivalent of the old red
sandstone, which there formed immense Hat areas until
they came to the newer tertiaries. That indicated the
probability that Russia had never been under water
during the whole of the long succession through which
that series of deposits had taken place here. The idea
that at certain periods there had been a clean sweep
of all the animals then existing, and that after a long
lapse of time a new net of animals had commenced
their existence, was not one which any modern geologist
would now sanction. A curious illustration of the
continuity of life was furnished by the deep-seit ex-
ploration in which he had been engaged. The deposit now
going on in the bed of the North Atlantic corresponded
in every essential particular with that of the chalk
period, eltowing that there had been a perfect con-
tinuity of deposits front that period to the present time
in the bed of the ocean, although there had been over
the area of Western Europe a succession of tertiary
deposits above the chalks. The white mud which had
been dredged up by hundredweights at once from a
depth of three miles, when tested under the microscope
had been found to correspond to the old chalks in all
characteristics. It was to the agency of a minute
form oranimal life that the productionof all calcareous
strata was due ; the limestone strata, back to the very
earliest periods, being probably due to similar agency.
Having shown highly magnified representations of
the different species of foraininiferte, which he pro-
duced from the various descriptions of chalk and
limestone, Dr. Carpenter gai&kan interesting account
of the discovery of this form of life of a much earlier
date than had ever before been suspected, namely, in
the serpentine limestone of the Laurentian rocks in
Canada. From the geological position of these rocks,
90,000 feet below the Cambrian series of this country,
it was now proved that animal life must have existed
so much earlier than any fossils known before, that the
lapse between the two was too great for human con-
ception, being comparable only to what astronomers
told them of the distance from the earth of certain
stars, whose light was computed to have taken millions
of centuries to travel before meeting the human eye.
In conclusion, Dr. Carpenter expressed the pleasure
that he felt at seeing so large an audience before
him.