I have spoken of the Silurian beach as if there were but one, not only because I wished to limit my sketch, and to attempt at least to give it the vividness of a special locality, but also because a single such shore will give us as good an idea of the characteristic fauna of the time as if we drew our material from a wider range.  There are, however, a great number of parallel ridges belonging to the Silurian and Devonian periods, running from east to west, not only through the State of New York, but far beyond, through the States of Michigan and Wisconsin into Minnesota; one may follow nine or ten such successive shores in unbroken lines, from the neighborhood of Lake Champlain to the Far West.  They have all the irregularities of modern seashores, running up to form little bays here, and jutting out in promontories there....

Although the early geological periods are more legible in North America, because they are exposed over such extensive tracts of land, yet they have been studied in many other parts of the globe.  In Norway, in Germany, in France, in Russia, in Siberia, in Kamchatka, in parts of South America,—­in short, wherever the civilization of the white race has extended, Silurian deposits have been observed, and everywhere they bear the same testimony to a profuse and varied creation.  The earth was teeming then with life as now; and in whatever corner of its surface the geologist finds the old strata, they hold a dead fauna as numerous as that which lives and moves above it.  Nor do we find that there was any gradual increase or decrease of any organic forms at the beginning and close of the successive periods.  On the contrary, the opening scenes of every chapter in the world’s history have been crowded with life, and its last leaves as full and varied as its first.

VOICES

From ‘Methods of Study in Natural History’

There is a chapter in the Natural History of animals that has hardly been touched upon as yet, and that will be especially interesting with reference to families.  The voices of animals have a family character not to be mistaken.  All the Canidae bark and howl!—­the fox, the wolf, the dog, have the same kind of utterance, though on a somewhat different pitch.  All the bears growl, from the white bear of the Arctic snows to the small black bear of the Andes.  All the cats meow, from our quiet fireside companion to the lions and tigers and panthers of the forests and jungle.  This last may seem a strange assertion; but to any one who has listened critically to their sounds and analyzed their voices, the roar of the lion is but a gigantic meow, bearing about the same proportion to that of a cat as its stately and majestic form does to the smaller, softer, more peaceful aspect of the cat.  Yet notwithstanding the difference in their size, who can look at the lion, whether in his more sleepy mood, as he lies curled up in the corner of his cage, or in his fiercer moments of hunger or of rage, without being reminded of a cat?  And this is not merely the resemblance of one carnivorous animal to another; for no one was ever reminded of a dog or wolf by a lion.