Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/106

 102

The fishes of Torre d'Orlando, in the Bay of Naples, near Castelamare, seem also to have perished suddenly. M. Agassiz finds that the countless individuals which occur there in Jurassic limestone, all belong to a single species of the genus Tetragonolepis. An entire shoal seems to have been destroyed at once, at a place where the waters were either contaminated with some noxious impregnation, or overcharged with heat.

In the same manner also, we may imagine deposites from muddy water, mixed perhaps with noxious gases, to have formed by their sediments a succession of thick beds of marl and clay, such as those of the Lias formation; and at the same time to have destroyed, not only the Testacea and lower orders of animals inhabiting the bottom, but also the higher orders of marine creatures within the regions thus invaded. Evidence of the fact of vast numbers of fishes and saurians having met with sudden death and immediate burial, is also afforded by the state of entire preservation in which the bodies of hundreds of them are often found in the Lias. It sometimes happens that scarely a single bone, or scale, has been removed from the place it occupied during life; this condition could not possibly have been retained, had the uncovered bodies of these animals been left, even for a few hours, exposed to putrefaction, and to the attacks of fishes and other smaller animals at the bottom of the sea.

of the head of the smaller fish supposed to be swallowed, is such as never could have entered the diminutive stomach of the putative glutton; moreover it does not enter within the margin of its jaws.