Hardly any recent
discovery shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the
former inhabitants of the world.
I may give another instance, which, from having passed under my own eyes
has much struck me. In a memoir on Fossil Sessile Cirripedes, I stated
that, from the large number of existing and extinct tertiary species; from
the extraordinary abundance of the individuals of many species all over the
world, from the Arctic regions to the equator, inhabiting various zones of
depths, from the upper tidal limits to fifty fathoms; from the perfect
manner in which specimens are preserved in the oldest tertiary beds; from
the ease with which even a fragment of a valve can be recognised; from all
these circumstances, I inferred that, had sessile cirripedes existed during
the secondary periods, they would certainly have been preserved and
discovered; and as not one species had then been discovered in beds of this
age, I concluded that this great group had been suddenly developed at the
commencement of the tertiary series. This was a sore trouble to me,
adding, as I then thought, one more instance of the abrupt appearance of a
great group of species. But my work had hardly been published, when a
skilful palaeontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect
specimen of an unmistakable sessile cirripede, which he had himself
extracted from the chalk of Belgium. And, as if to make the case as
striking as possible, this cirripede was a Chthamalus, a very common,
large, and ubiquitous genus, of which not one species has as yet been found
even in any tertiary stratum.
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