seeing, in two distinct ways, some by having no eyes and some colossal ones, strenuous individuals increasing their equipment and the lazy letting it lapse. It seems more than questionable to attribute this blindness to a deep-sea habitat, as Suess does in describing them, for they lived in what geologists agree were shallow seas on the site of Bohemia to-day. Besides, trilobites never had abyssal proclivities; for they are found preserved in littoral deposits, not in deep-sea silt. Muddy water may have had some hand in this, but muddy water itself testifies to great commotion above and torrential rains. So the light in those seas was not what it became later, or would be now. Thus these trilobites were antelucan members of their brotherhood, and this accuses a lack of light in those earlier eras even greater than in Carboniferous times, which is just where it ought to be found if the theory is true.
I trust this conception may prove acceptable to geologists, for it seems imperative from the astronomic side that something of the sort must have occurred. And it is just as well, if not better, to view it thus in the light of the dawn of geologic history as to remain in the dark about it altogether. Nescience is not science—whether hyphenized or apart; for the whole object of science is to synthesize and explain. Its body of learning is but the letter, coordination the spirit, of its law. Nevertheless, the unpardonable impropriety of a new
