structure.  In both these and the ordinary oolites, the structure is fundamentally the same.  Both have been formed in a sea, probably of no great depth, the waters of which were charged with carbonate of lime in solution, whilst the bottom was formed of sand intermixed with minute shells and fragments of the skeletons of larger marine animals.  The excess of lime in the sea-water was precipitated round the sand-grams, or round the smaller shells, as so many nuclei, and this precipitation must often have taken place time after time, so as to give rise to the concentric structure so characteristic of oolitic concretions.  Finally, the oolitic grains thus produced were cemented together by a further precipitation of crystalline carbonate of lime from the waters of the ocean.

[Illustration:  Fig. 14.—­Slice of arenaceous and oolitic limestone from the Carboniferous series of Shap, Westmoreland; magnified.  The section also exhibit Foraminifera and other minute fossils.  (Original.)]

Phosphate of Lime is another lime-salt, which is of interest to the palaeontologist.  It does not occur largely in the stratified series, but it is found in considerable beds [4] in the Laurentian formation, and less abundantly in some later rock-groups, whilst it occurs abundantly in the form of nodules in parts of the Cretaceous (Upper Greensand) and Tertiary deposits.  Phosphate of lime forms the larger proportion of the earthy matters of the bones of Vertebrate animals, and also occurs in less amount in the skeletons of certain of the Invertebrates (e.g., Crustacea).  It is, indeed, perhaps more distinctively than carbonate of lime, an organic compound; and though the formation of many known deposits of phosphate of lime cannot be positively shown to be connected with the previous operation of living beings, there is room for doubt whether this salt is not in reality always primarily a product of vital action.  The phosphatic nodules of the Upper Greensand are erroneously called “coprolites,” from the belief originally entertained that they were the droppings or fossilised excrements of extinct animals; and though this is not the case, there can be little doubt but that the phosphate of lime which they contain is in this instance of organic origin.[5] It appears, in fact, that decaying animal matter has a singular power of determining the precipitation around it of mineral salts dissolved in water.  Thus, when any animal bodies are undergoing decay at the bottom of the sea, they have a tendency to cause the precipitation from the surrounding water of any mineral matters which may be dissolved in it; and the organic body thus becomes a centre round which the mineral matters in question are deposited in the form of a “concretion” or “nodule.”  The phosphatic nodules in question were formed in a sea in which phosphate of lime, derived from the destruction of animal skeletons, was held largely in solution; and a precipitation of it took place round