It was supposed till very lately that few if any Mammalia were to be
found below the Tertiary rocks, _i. e._ those above the chalk; and this
supposed fact was very comfortable to those who support the doctrine
of “progressive development,” and hold, with the notorious _Vestiges
of Creation_, that a fish by mere length of time became a reptile,
a lemur an ape, and finally an ape a man. But here, as in a hundred
other cases, facts, when duly investigated, are against their theory.
A mammal jaw had been already discovered by Mr. Brodie on the shore at
the back of Swanage Point, in Dorsetshire, when Mr. Beckles, F.G.S.,
traced the vein from which this jaw had been procured, and found it
to be a stratum about five inches thick, at the base of the Middle
Purbeck beds; and after removing many thousand tons of rock, and laying
bare an area of nearly 7000 square feet (the largest cutting ever made
for purely scientific purposes), he found reptiles (tortoises and
lizards) in hundreds; but the most important discovery was that of
the jaws of at least fourteen different species of mammalia. Some of
these were herbivorous, some carnivorous, connected with our modern
shrews, moles, hedgehogs, &c.; but all of them perfectly developed and
highly-organised quadrupeds. Ten years ago, no remains of quadrupeds
were believed to exist in the Secondary strata. “Even in 1854,” says
Sir Charles Lyell (in a supplement to the fifth edition of his _Manual
of Elementary Geology_), “only six species of mammals from rocks older
than the Tertiary were known in the whole world.” We now possess
evidence of the existence of fourteen species, belonging to eight or
nine genera, from the fresh-water strata of the Middle Purbeck Oolite.
It would be rash now to fix a limit in past time to the existence of
quadrupeds.--_The Rev. C. Kingsley._