[Footnote 3:  Lat. fossus, dug up.]

Fossilisation.—­ The term “fossilisation” is applied to all those processes through which the remains of organised beings may pass in being converted into fossils.  These processes are numerous and varied; but there are three principal modes of fossilisation which alone need be considered here.  In the first instance, the fossil is to all intents and purposes an actual portion of the original organised being—­such as a bone, a shell, or a piece of wood.  In some rare instances, as in the case of the body of the Mammoth discovered embedded in ice at the mouth of the Lena in Siberia, the fossil may be preserved almost precisely in its original condition, and even with its soft parts uninjured.  More commonly, certain changes have taken place in the fossil, the principal being the more or less total removal of the organic matter originally present.  Thus bones become light and porous by the removal of their gelatine, so as to cleave to the tongue on being applied to that organ; whilst shells become fragile, and lose their primitive colours.  In other cases, though practically the real body it represents, all the cavities of the fossil, down to its minutest recesses, may have become infiltrated with mineral matter.  It need hardly be added, that it is in the more modern rocks that we find the fossils, as a rule, least changed from their former condition; but the original structure is often more or less completely retained in some of the fossils from even the most ancient formations.

In the second place, we very frequently meet with fossils in the state of “casts” or moulds of the original organic body.  What occurs in this case will be readily understood if we imagine any common bivalve shell, as an Oyster, or Mussel, or Cockle, embedded in clay or mud.  If the clay were sufficiently soft and fluid, the first thing would be that it would gain access to the interior of the shell, and would completely fill up the space between the valves.  The pressure, also, of the surrounding matter would insure that the clay would everywhere adhere closely to the exterior of the shell.  If now we suppose the clay to be in any way hardened so as to be converted into stone, and if we were to break up the stone, we should obviously have the following state of parts.  The clay which filled the shell would form an accurate cast of the interior of the shell, and the clay outside would give us an exact impression or cast of the exterior of the shell (fig. 1).  We should have, then, two casts, an interior and an exterior, and the two would be very different to one another, since the inside of a shell is very unlike the outside.  In the case, in fact, of many univalve shells, the interior cast or “mould” is so unlike the exterior cast, or unlike the shell itself, that it may be difficult to determine the true origin of the former.

[Illustration:  Fig. 1.—­Trigonia longa, showing casts to of the exterior and interior of the shell.—­Cretaceous (Neocomian).]