They are mere live bags full of jelly, which can take almost any shape they like, and thrust out arms--or what serve for arms-- through the holes in their shells, and then contract them into themselves again, as this Globigerina does. What they feed on, how they grow, how they make their exquisitely-formed shells, whether, indeed, they are, strictly speaking, animals or vegetables, Analysis has not yet found out. But when you come to read about them, you will find that they, in their own way, are just as wonderful and mysterious as a butterfly or a rose; and just as necessary, likewise, to Madam How's work; for out of them, as I told you, she makes whole sheets of down, whole ranges of hills.
No one knew anything, I believe, about them, save that two or three kinds of them were found in chalk, till a famous Frenchman, called D'Orbigny, just thirty years ago, told the world how he had found many beautiful fresh kinds; and, more strange still, that some of these kinds were still alive at the bottom of the Adriatic, and of the harbour of Alexandria, in Egypt.
Then in 1841 a gentleman named Edward Forbes,--now with God--whose name will be for ever dear to all who love science, and honour genius and virtue,-- found in the AEgean Sea "a bed of chalk," he said, "full of Foraminifera, and shells of Pteropods," forming at the bottom of the sea.
And what are Pteropods?
What you might call sea-moths (though they are not really moths), which swim about on the surface of the water, while the right- whales suck them in tens of thousands into the great whalebone net which fringes their jaws. Here are drawings of them. 1. Limacina (on which the whales feed); and 2. Hyalea, a lovely little thing in a glass shell, which lives in the Mediterranean.
But since then strange discoveries have been made, especially by the naval officers who surveyed the bottom of the great Atlantic Ocean before laying down the electric cable between Ireland and America. And this is what they found:
That at the bottom of the Atlantic were vast plains of soft mud, in some places 2500 fathoms (15,000 feet) deep; that is, as deep as the Alps are high. And more: they found out, to their surprise, that the oozy mud of the Atlantic floor was made up almost entirely of just the same atomies as make up our chalk, especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed of chalk was now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, with living shells and sea-animals of the most brilliant colours crawling about on it in black darkness, and beds of sponges growing out of it, just as the sponges grew at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, and were all, generation after generation, turned into flints.
And, for reasons which you will hardly understand, men are beginning now to believe that the chalk has never ceased to be made, somewhere or other, for many thousand years, ever since the Winchester Downs were at the bottom of the sea: and that "the Globigerina-mud is not merely A chalk formation, but a continuation of THE chalk formation, so THAT WE MAY BE SAID TO BE STILL LIVING IN THE AGE OF CHALK." {1} Ah, my little man, what would I not give to see you, before I die, add one such thought as that to the sum of human knowledge!
So there the little creatures have been lying, ****** chalk out of the lime in the sea-water, layer over layer, the young over the old, the dead over the living, year after year, age after age--for how long?
Who can tell? How deep the layer of new chalk at the bottom of the Atlantic is, we can never know. But the layer of live atomies on it is not an inch thick, probably not a tenth of an inch. And if it grew a tenth of an inch a year, or even a whole inch, how many years must it have taken to make the chalk of our downs, which is in some parts 1300 feet thick? How many inches are there in 1300 feet? Do that sum, and judge for yourself.
One difference will be found between the chalk now forming at the bottom of the ocean, if it ever become dry land, and the chalk on which you tread on the downs. The new chalk will be full of the teeth and bones of whales--warm-blooded creatures, who suckle their young like cows, instead of laying eggs, like birds and fish. For there were no whales in the old chalk ocean; but our modern oceans are full of cachalots, porpoises, dolphins, swimming in shoals round any ship; and their bones and teeth, and still more their ear-bones, will drop to the bottom as they die, and be found, ages hence, in the mud which the live atomies make, along with wrecks of mighty ships "Great anchors, heaps of pearl," and all that man has lost in the deep seas. And sadder fossils yet, my child, will be scattered on those white plains:-
"To them the love of woman hath gone down, Dark roll their waves o'er manhood's noble head.
O'er youth's bright locks, and beauty's flowing crown;
Yet shall they hear a voice, 'Restore the dead.'
Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee.
Give back the dead, thou Sea!"