On the Origin and Progress of the Art of

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On the Origin and Progress of the
Art of Music by John Taverner

John Taverner’s lectures on music constitute the only extant version

of a complete university course in music in early modern England.
Originally composed in 1611 in both English and Latin, they were
delivered at Gresham College in London between 1611 and 1638,
and it is likely that Taverner intended at some point to publish the
lectures in the form of a music treatise. The lectures, which Taverner
collectively titled De Ortu et Progressu Artis Musicæ (“On the Origin
and Progress of the Art of Music”), represent a clear attempt to
ground musical education in humanist study, particularly in Latin and
Greek philology. Taverner’s reliance on classical and humanist writers
attests to the durability of music’s association with rhetoric and
philology, an approach to music that is too often assigned to early
Tudor England. Taverner is also a noteworthy player in the
seventeenth-century Protestant debates over music, explicitly
defending music against Reformist polemicists who see music as an
overly sensuous activity.
In this first published edition of Taverner’s musical writings,
Joseph M. Ortiz comprehensively introduces, edits, and annotates
the text of the lectures, and an appendix contains the existing Latin
version of Taverner’s text. By shedding light on a neglected figure in
English Renaissance music history, this edition is a significant
contribution to the study of musical thought in Renaissance England,
humanism, Protestant Reformism, and the history of education.

Joseph M. Ortiz is Associate Professor of English at the University

of Texas at El Paso, where he teaches Renaissance and comparative
literature. He is the author of Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the
Politics of Music (2011) and the editor of Shakespeare and the
Culture of Romanticism (2013). He has written several articles and
chapters on Renaissance literature, Renaissance musical thought,
and the reception of classical culture in Renaissance Europe.
Music Theory in Britain, 1500–1700: Critical Editions
Edited by Jessie Ann Owens
University of California, Davis, USA

This series represents the first systematic attempt to present the entire range of
theoretical writing about music by English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers from
1500 to 1700 in modern critical editions. These editions, which use original
spelling and follow currently accepted practices for the publication of early modern
texts, aim to situate the work in the larger historical context and provide a view of
musical practices.

A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke by Elway Bevin

Denis Collins

John Birchensha: Writings on Music

Christopher D.S. Field and Benjamin Wardhaugh

‘The Temple of Music’ by Robert Fludd

Peter Hauge

Thomas Salmon: Writings on Music

Benjamin Wardhaugh

The Music Treatises of Thomas Ravenscroft

Ross W. Duffin

John Wallis: Writings on Music

David Cram and Benjamin Wardhaugh

The Praise of Musicke, 1586: An Edition with Commentary

Hyun–Ah Kim

For more information about this series, please visit:

www.routledge.com/music/series/ASHMTB.
On the Origin and Progress of the
Art of Music by John Taverner

Edited by Joseph M. Ortiz

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Joseph M. Ortiz
The right of Joseph M. Ortiz to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Taverner, John, 1584–1638, author. | Ortiz, Joseph M., 1972– editor.
Title: On the origin and progress of the art of music / by John Taverner ; edited by
Joseph M. Ortiz.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Music
theory in Britain, 1500–1700: critical editions | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020022| ISBN 9781138633698 (hardback) | ISBN
9781315207193 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Music--History and criticism--Early works to 1800.
Classification: LCC ML159 .T39 2019 | DDC 781--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020022
ISBN: 978-1-138-63369-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-20719-3 (ebk)
Contents

List of figures
Series editor’s preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction
I. Taverner and Gresham College
1. Biography of John Taverner
2. The founding of Gresham College
3. John Bull and the Gresham music professorship
4. Taverner and the evolution of the Gresham music
professorship
5. Audiences and readers of the Gresham lectures
II. Taverner’s music lectures
1. Overview and form of the lectures
2. Humanism and philology in the lectures
3. The Reformist critique of music
4. Evolving ideas of musical literacy

On the origin and progress of the art of music (English

lectures)
Lecture1
Lecture2
Lecture3
Lecture4
Lecture5
Lecture6
Lecture7
Lecture8
 Lecture9

Appendix: Taverner’s Gresham College music lectures in

Latin
Editorial note
Lecture 0 (inaugural lecture)
Lecture 1
Lecture 2
Lecture 3
Lecture 4
Lecture 5
Lecture 6
Lecture 7

Bibliography
Index
Figures

1. Portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham, from John Ward, Lives of the

Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740).
2. Plan of Gresham College, from John Ward, Lives of the
Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740).
3. First page of John Taverner’s Gresham College music lectures in
English, from Sloane MS 2329, British Library.
4. Detail from the Gresham repertory minutes of the Joint Grand
Gresham Committee, showing the committee’s votes for the
Professor of Divinity in 1610.
Series editor’s preface

The purpose of this series is to provide critical editions of music

theory in Britain (primarily England, but Scotland, Ireland and Wales
also) from 1500 to 1700. By ‘theory’ is meant all sorts of writing
about music, from textbooks aimed at the beginner to treatises
written for a more sophisticated audience. These foundational texts
have immense value in revealing attitudes, ways of thinking and
even vocabulary critical for understanding and analyzing music. They
reveal beliefs about the power of music, its function in society and
its role in education, and they furnish valuable information about
performance practice and the context of performance. They are a
window into musical culture every bit as important as the music
itself.
The editions in this series present the text in its original form. That
is, they retain original spelling, capitalization and punctuation, as
well as certain salient features of the type, for example the choice of
front. A textual commentary in each volume offers an explication of
difficult or unfamiliar terminology as well as suggested corrections of
printing errors; the introduction situates the work and its author in a
larger historical context.
Jessie Ann Owens
Professor of Music
Dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
University of California, Davis, USA
Acknowledgments

My work on this edition owes a great deal to Jessie Ann Owens, who
encouraged and aided it at many stages of its development. I also
received insightful feedback at various times from Linda Phyllis
Austern, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, and Ross Duffin. Their pioneering
work has been indispensable for my forays into the field of
Renaissance music history. Jane Ruddell and Donna Marshall at the
Mercers’ Company graciously helped me navigate the company’s
Gresham archives. At Routledge, Heidi Bishop and Annie Vaughan
helped shepherd the book through its various stages of production. I
am very grateful to Minji Kim for her judicious copyediting and to
Sarah Powell for her assistance with the Latin paleography. The
Renaissance Society of America provided a timely grant that enabled
me to conduct crucial archival research in the final stages of the
project. Finally, I am grateful to the British Library and Folger
Shakespeare Library, which generously allowed access to rare
materials necessary for this edition, as well as providing an ideal
environment for much of the work on this project.
Introduction

This volume presents the first published version of John Taverner’s

Gresham College music lectures, which were composed in 1611 or
shortly thereafter. The lectures exist in a single manuscript in the
British Library (Sloane MS 2329) that has rarely been cited in studies
of English Renaissance music history, even though it comprises what
may be the only extant text of a complete university music course in
Renaissance England. In keeping with the standard requirements for
Gresham professors, Taverner delivered his lectures in both English
and Latin, and the manuscript preserves both versions. At some
point, Taverner or a later owner of the manuscript entitled the
lectures De Ortu & Progressu Artis Musicæ, Tractat: Histor: (“A
Treatise or History of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Music”),
and it is possible that Taverner intended to publish his lectures. In
the treatise, Taverner takes a historical, humanist approach to music
education, eschewing both mathematical approaches and instruction
in musical composition or performance. Accordingly, the treatise
relies heavily on classical and early Christian authorities, both in
Greek and Latin texts, while regularly lamenting the loss of musical
performances and methods as they were believed to have existed in
antiquity. In this respect, Taverner’s treatise constitutes a unique link
between the humanist laus musicae tradition and the growing
demand for utilitarian, or “practical,” music instruction.

I Taverner and Gresham College

1. Biography of John Taverner

Little is known about John Taverner (1584–1638) other than that he
attended Cambridge and Oxford Universities and was later appointed
Professor of Music at Gresham College. Most of what we do know
about Taverner was originally compiled and preserved by the
antiquarian John Ward, whose Lives of the Professors of Gresham
College (1740) provides a detailed account of all the men who held
professorships at Gresham from its inception in 1597. Ward identifies
the Taverners as an “antient and good family” that could trace its
origins to Norfolk in the thirteenth century. John Taverner’s
grandfather, Richard Taverner (1505–1575), had served as clerk to
Thomas Cromwell before being made a clerk of the signet and then
a Member of Parliament, all during the reign of Henry VIII. Ward
emphasizes Richard’s credentials as a Protestant reformer, noting
that he had been authorized by Edward VI to preach throughout
England despite being a “layman” and that Elizabeth I had knighted
him in recognition of his preaching.1 Early in his career, Richard
Taverner had translated several works of Erasmus and published an
English translation of the Bible, which he dedicated to Henry VIII.
This translation, which was notable for its wealth of annotations and
its attempt to replace Latinate words with more idiomatic, Saxon
forms of English, went through nine editions between 1539 and
1551.2 Having established himself as the English translator of
Erasmus and as someone whose Greek language skills were near
legendary, Richard Taverner continued to produce treatises and
translations in support of Protestantism throughout the remainder of
his life.3
Like his grandfather, John Taverner studied at both Cambridge and
Oxford and distinguished himself as a serious scholar and talented
linguist. He had attended Westminster School in London before
matriculating at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1597, at the relatively
young age of thirteen.4 He graduated to the Bachelor of Arts degree
in 1601 and the Master of Arts degree in 1605. Because of
incorporation (the policy by which Cambridge and Oxford each
recognized the other’s degrees), Taverner received the Master of
Arts degree from Oxford when he took up residence at Balliol
College in 1606. While he surely would have studied music in some
form at Cambridge, it is not clear whether it was his main focus or
part of a broader program of study. The letters of recommendation
from Oxford that ultimately led to Taverner’s appointment at
Gresham make only elliptical references to his knowledge of music,
suggesting that his musical expertise was limited. Likewise,
Taverner’s music lectures at Gresham indicate little interest in or
experience with music as a composer or performer. What is clear
from the letters and Taverner’s writings is that he was extraordinarily
proficient in Latin and Greek and was accustomed to working with
people with a similar background in classical languages and
literature. In addition, Taverner appears to have had a talent for
building and maintaining professional networks, both in academic
and clerical circles. For example, in his letters of recommendation,
Taverner was able to enlist the support of the master of Balliol
College, seven Balliol College fellows, several heads of colleges at
Oxford, and John King himself—the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
University who would later become the Bishop of London.
In terms of religious affiliation, John Taverner was clearly
Protestant, though he does not seem to have had the same
Reformist zeal as his illustrious grandfather. Taverner’s Gresham
lectures are generally sympathetic to Protestant beliefs, as when
they promote the Bible as the primary basis for education and
consider classical texts merely as moral fables. At the same time,
Taverner distanced himself from extreme Protestant views, often
showing his support for James’s position on church practices. This
kind of moderation likely helped Taverner when he applied for the
Gresham professorship, since the hiring committee generally favored
candidates who were less likely to provoke religious controversy.5
Taverner’s reputation as a moderate also likely influenced his
appointment as the secretary to John King, the Bishop of London
from 1611 to 1621. After serving as the bishop’s secretary, Taverner
held a number of clerical positions, all while maintaining his position
as Gresham music professor. He was the vicar of Tillingham in Essex
from 1624 to 1629, and then concurrently the vicar of Hexton in
Hertfordshire and the rector of Stoke Newington parish in Middlesex
from 1629 to 1638. Taverner died in 1638 and was buried at Stoke
Newington, a small village north of London.6
Further information about Taverner has yet to come to light. He
was not the same John Taverner who was the Surveyor of the Royal
Woods in the early 1600s and published a slim book on fishing and
fruit-growing (although this other Taverner was, in fact, a distant
cousin).7 Another distant relative who shared the same name was
the early sixteenth-century musician John Taverner (c. 1490–1545)
who composed several masses and motets while serving as master
of the choristers at Cardinal College, Oxford and who had once been
charged with heresy on account of his involvement with Lutheran
reformists.8 Ironically, although Gresham’s John Taverner is less well
known than his more provocative relations, it may have been
precisely his ability to maintain a low profile that enabled him to
exert a significant influence on the development of music education
in London in the first half of the seventeenth century. When Taverner
died in 1638, he had been the Gresham music professor for twenty-
eight years, longer than anyone else until the nineteenth century.
Such tenure is significant given the constant friction between
Gresham’s professors and administrators, but it is also significant
considering that Taverner was straddling musical and clerical
positions at a time when music was often under attack by reformers.
In any case, Taverner’s biography suggests that he was unusually
adept at managing different professional relationships
simultaneously, even though (as we will see) he held strong views
about the role of music and humanist learning in English society.

2. The founding of Gresham College

The Gresham College that Taverner joined in 1610 was still
remarkably new, having been in existence for only fourteen years.
The founding of the College was the direct result of a bequest by Sir
Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), the hugely successful London
merchant who had established the Royal Exchange during his
lifetime (Fig. 1). Gresham, one of the leading members of the
Mercers’ Company, had traveled regularly to Antwerp as the royal
agent responsible for managing English commerce with the
Netherlands. According to Richard Chartres and David Vermont,
Gresham’s visits to Antwerp made him keenly aware of the cultural
and technological shortcomings of England, which during the
sixteenth century had the reputation of being “something of a
cultural backwater” when compared to other cosmopolitan centers in
Europe.9 Presumably for this reason, when Gresham considered how
to bequeath his massive fortune, he kept among his priorities the
establishment of some kind of educational institution. Initially,
Gresham had entertained the idea of founding a new college at
Cambridge University, which he had attended for a few years early in
his life. However, when Gresham finally made his will in 1575, he
included detailed instructions for the establishment of a college in
the City of London, separate from the universities at Cambridge and
Oxford.10 After Gresham’s death in 1579, the responsibility for
executing these plans for the new college fell to the Mercers’
Company. Because of a number of legal and administrative
difficulties, including legal challenges to Gresham’s will by his
surviving relatives and confusion over how to carry out his
instructions, it would be nearly twenty years before Gresham’s vision
for a new college was finally realized. Nonetheless, in late 1597,
inaugural lectures were given by each of the seven newly appointed
professors, marking the formal opening of Gresham College.
Figure 1 Portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham, from John Ward, Lives of the Professors
of Gresham College (London, 1740).

Gresham’s plan for the College, which he outlined in his will, was
innovative in many ways (Fig. 2). First, his decision to situate the
College in the center of London immediately made it distinct from
Cambridge and Oxford, which were often seen as isolated enclaves
of academic study. Gresham’s intention was to make the lectures
accessible to London’s businessmen and tradesmen, whom he
believed would benefit from scientific and humanistic studies. As
someone who had long been committed to improving England’s
trading abilities, Gresham was especially sensitive to the need for
more mathematical and navigational expertise.11 This awareness
accounts for the fact that two of the seven professorships
designated in Gresham’s will were in geometry and astronomy—
fields that were not similarly recognized at Oxford or Cambridge but
that had direct relevance for merchants and tradesmen who relied
on the latest developments in navigational technology.12 (The other
five professorships were in music, divinity, law, physic, and rhetoric.)
In a very direct way, Gresham envisioned a model of instruction that
was to be more practical and utilitarian than that at the established
universities.

Figure 2 Plan of Gresham College, from John Ward, Lives of the Professors of
Gresham College (London, 1740).

Gresham’s plan was also innovative in its attempt to make

education accessible to a larger audience. As Ian Adamson has
shown, the early discussions held by the founders of Gresham
College clearly indicate that they understood that one of the
College’s principal aims was accessibility for people who would
normally not be able to attend Oxford or Cambridge.13 In trying to
realize this goal, they agreed to make the lectures free to the public,
and, perhaps more significantly, they stipulated that the lectures
would be conducted in both Latin and English—in contrast to
lectures at Oxford and Cambridge which were normally in Latin only.
The initial plan was to have each professor give two hour-long
lectures in Latin and a one-hour lecture in English that summarized
the Latin lectures, but the founders ultimately decided that each
professor would give a one-hour lecture in Latin and the same one-
hour lecture in English.14 The founders were explicit about the
reasons for this innovation, which they saw as part of a more
democratic, socializing model of education: “this reading in English
will give the people so much taste of learning, as they will not
despise it, as the ruder sort do; and yet make them withall to find
their own wants.”15
Other decisions in the establishment of the College were also
intended to promote a more democratic model of education,
including the content of the lectures themselves. As Adamson puts
it, “the contents of the lectures were designed to be of use to the
untutored populace of London and the ‘availability’ of the professors
was offered as an inducement to Londoners to consult them outside
the formal teaching hours.”16 This emphasis on utilitarianism
influenced the teaching of both new and traditional subjects at
Gresham. For example, the Gresham professors of astronomy,
geometry, and physic were expected to move beyond mystical or
“idealist” approaches to mathematics and instead focus on applying
mathematics to physical phenomena.17 At the same time, some
Renaissance Londoners saw the potential of Gresham College in still
broader terms. In The Third Universitie of England (1615), George
Buck asserts that Gresham’s decision to found a college was an
attempt to reform the social role of his fellow businessmen:

a notable example to the rest of his qualitie the richer Marchants,

and more opulent Cittizens of London, the favorites of Pluto and
Mercury, to imploy some good part of their great wealth in
publike workes of necessarie or pious use, or of ornament, of
 either, or of all, least the remaynder, bee ryotously consumed by
… ungracious heyres.18

Not surprisingly, Gresham’s role in inspiring such innovations to

education has long made him a progressive hero. Edward Taylor, a
nineteenth-century Gresham music professor, wrote in his brief
history of the College that Thomas Gresham had

enjoyed the advantages of a university education but he knew

this to be unattainable by many of his fellow citizens and his aim
was to bring these advantages to their own doors, to place within
the reach of all, without regard to creed or party, their ennobling
and exalting influences.19

More recently, the innovativeness of Gresham’s vision has been

strongly asserted by the historian Christopher Hill, who in his
influential studies of English intellectual history in the seventeenth
century has frequently characterized Gresham College as an
institution “founded by a merchant, controlled by merchants,
providing adult education for a lay public of mariners and others
ignorant of Latin by methods which deliberately deviated from those
applied in Oxford and Cambridge.”20 While others have disagreed
with Hill’s rosy view of the College’s democratic progressiveness,
there can be no question that the establishment of Gresham College
represented, at least for its founders, a creative experiment in higher
education.
For all of its innovativeness, Gresham College was still a traditional
academic institution in a number of ways. The founder’s decision
that Gresham professors would come from Oxford and Cambridge
ensured a strong streak of pedagogical conservatism. Normally, each
university would nominate one candidate for each post, and a
committee composed of members of the Mercers’ Company and the
City of London would choose among the nominated scholars. The
committee was also responsible for establishing the logistics through
which the professors would function at Gresham College, such as
salaries, living arrangements, the times and frequency of lectures,
and other rules governing the professors’ conduct.21 For example,
the committee initially established a requirement that Gresham
professors be unmarried, with the consequence that any professor
who married effectively had to relinquish his position. The result of
this arrangement was a constant tension between Gresham’s
administrators and professors, who were often reluctant to abandon
the kind of academic life they had known at Cambridge and Oxford
and did not share the same progressive zeal for education. As
Adamson has shown in great detail, the early years of Gresham
College were marked by a series of squabbles between the Gresham
committee and the professors, with the latter (who often had the
backing of influential persons in the court or other nobility) typically
emerging as the winner.
Nonetheless, despite the administrative and political difficulties
that dogged the College throughout the seventeenth century, many
of the lectures delivered there consisted of original and significant
work, and the College regularly served as a venue for contemporary
academic debates, including several that pertained to music. Indeed,
one of the clearest signs of the College’s continuing relevance to,
and stimulation of, English academic life was the fact that the Royal
Society, arguably the most important institution of scientific research
in England in the seventeenth century, held its first meetings at the
College in the 1640s. As Penelope Gouk puts it, the Royal Society
was revolutionary in its development of a new kind of “public
science”—a science that operated through “the demonstration of
philosophical experiments before an audience whose principal role is
to witness and judge that performance.”22 In part, this performative,
audience-centered model of science had a basis in the innovative,
democratic approach to higher education that Sir Thomas Gresham
had envisioned when he first outlined plans for the College.

3. John Bull and the Gresham music

professorship
Gresham College’s first music professor was by far its most
illustrious. When John Bull (c. 1562–1628) first took up residence at
Gresham in 1597, he already had a national reputation as an
exceptionally talented performer and composer. He had distinguished
himself as an organist of remarkable ability as early as 1586 when
he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. It was through this
position that he favorably impressed the Archbishop of Canterbury,
who secured for Bull premium accommodations at Hereford
Cathedral. Like the composer William Byrd, who was also a
Gentleman of the Chapel Royal at the time, Bull was an avowed
Catholic, though this fact appears not to have impeded his
professional career. Bull received the Bachelor of Music degree from
Oxford in 1586 and the Doctor of Music degree from Cambridge
likely in 1589, when he started using the title of “doctor” in his
professional correspondence. By 1596, he was making regular use of
his title as “Dr. John Bull, Organist of Her Majesty’s Chapel.” By this
time he had also caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who was
impressed with his musicianship and actively supported his
professional career. Most notably, when news of the Gresham music
professorship became known, it was Elizabeth herself who
recommended Bull for the position, effectively appointing him.
Moreover, once Bull was elected to the professorship, it was
Elizabeth who granted him permission to give his lectures in English
only, in contrast to other Gresham faculty.
Bull’s musical reputation continued to grow while at Gresham,
though his tenure at the College was rocky at best. Like many of the
other Gresham professors, Bull regularly engaged in professional
squabbles with the College’s administrators.23 In addition, Bull took
an extended leave of absence from his teaching duties in 1602,
during which time he was temporarily replaced by Thomas Byrd,
William Byrd’s son. The Mercers’ Company minutes list “sicknes” as
the reason for Bull’s leave of absence, although the historian
Anthony Wood speculated that Bull was actually traveling abroad in
France and Germany during this time.24 Because of the Gresham
policy requiring professors to remain unmarried, Bull eventually had
to resign from his post permanently in December 1607 when he was
compelled to marry Elizabeth Walter, who was pregnant with his
child. Bull continued to serve as an organist in the Chapel Royal, and
he subsequently became involved with the musical education of King
James I’s children, first Prince Henry and later Princess Elizabeth.25
Along with William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, Bull was one of the
composers of Parthenia, or The Maydenhead (1613), the volume of
virginal music that had been produced on the occasion of Princess
Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Frederick, the Elector Palatine. Despite
Bull’s favored status at court, his situation took a turn for the worse
when he was charged with adultery by the Court of High
Commission in 1613. Bull avoided persecution by fleeing to the
Netherlands, which infuriated James and spurred the king to
pressure Bull’s Dutch patrons (principally the Archduke) to abandon
him. Bull nonetheless continued in the Netherlands as an organ
player and tuner for several years, and he died in Antwerp in 1628
having never returned to England.26
While Bull’s clashes with his Gresham employers and James (as
well as his apparent concupiscence) did much to establish his
notoriety, there is substantial evidence that he had already begun to
act as a lightning rod for controversy when he started teaching at
Gresham College. Part of this controversy may have stemmed from
Bull’s Catholicism, but most of it had to do with his particular style of
musicianship. A suggestive example of the ambivalence toward Bull’s
musicianship comes from an anecdote about him that began to
circulate in England sometime in the seventeenth century. The story,
as it was first documented by Anthony Wood (and later repeated by
John Ward in his biography of Gresham professors), recounts Bull’s
activities during his leave of absence from Gresham College in 1602:

Dr. Bull took occasion to go incognito into France and Germany.

At length hearing of a famous musician belonging to a certain
cathedral, (at St. Omers, as I have heard) he applied himself as a
novice to him, to learn something of his faculty, and to see and
admire his works. This musician, after some discourse had
 passed between them, conducted Bull to a vestry, or music
school joyning to the cathedral, and shew’d to him a lesson or
song of forty parts, and then made a vaunting challenge to any
person in the world to add one more part to them; supposing it
to be so compleat and full, that it was impossible for any mortal
man to correct, or add to it. Bull thereupon desiring the use of
ink and rul’d paper (such as we call musical paper) prayed the
musician to lock him up in the said school for 2 or 3 hours; which
being done, not without great disdain by the musician, Bull in
that time, or less, added forty more parts to the said lesson or
song. The musician thereupon being called in, he viewed it, tried
it, and retry’d it. At length he burst out into a great ecstasy, and
swore by the great God, that he that added those 40 parts, must
either be the Devil, or Dr. Bull. Whereupon Bull making himself
known, the musician fell down and ador’d him.27

Though this remarkable story may be apocryphal, it appears to have

circulated widely in seventeenth-century England. Ward notes that
the episode was discredited almost as soon as it was publicized:

That part of the story relating to the forty parts, said to have
been added by Dr. Bull in two or three hours, has been rejected
by our best artists in music, as a thing wholly improbable. And
the account they give of it, as handed down to them by tradition,
is this; that the lesson or song, when delivered to the doctor,
consisted of sixteen parts, to which he added four others.28

Ward’s “correction” of the historical record here is telling in its zeal to

downplay Bull’s virtuosity: a twenty-part song would not have been
especially remarkable compared to other contemporary polyphonic
works. Thus, regardless of the story’s veracity, the academic
bickering over what actually happened in St. Omer’s Cathedral points
to a real fact about Bull’s reputation in England: his near-mythic
virtuosity was seen by some as transgressing the boundaries of
humanly possible music and effectively skirting the bounds of the
occult.29 This view of Bull’s music was encouraged by Bull himself,
particularly in compositions that he deliberately imbued with a sense
of mysticism.30 In this respect, Bull’s music encouraged audiences
and readers to regard it as a mystical icon, just as the anecdote of
his appearance at St. Omer’s encouraged the reputation of Bull—
either approvingly or scandalously—as an object of idolatrous
devotion.
Bull’s particular style of musical virtuosity was likely on full display
while he was at Gresham. For one thing, he appears to have used
his lectures to showcase his new, innovative compositions.
Christopher Field suggests that one of these compositions performed
at Gresham was an experimental keyboard work that progressed
through the entire circle of fifths, including all twelve hexachord
classes.31 Such a performance would have been a dazzling show of
ingenuity, effectively extending the range of the tonal system. While
historians have consistently attributed Bull’s request to skip the Latin
lectures to a lack of proficiency in the language, it is just as likely
(and possibly more so given Bull’s education) that his request was
made to allow him to devote a full hour to musical demonstrations.32
As a sign of the approach he would take to music instruction, Bull
hinted at his propensity for dazzling musical displays in his inaugural
lecture at Gresham. In the opening of the lecture, he evokes fully
the idea of music’s mystic, divine quality:

It is written … that the Eagle only soaring aloft into the clouds,
looketh with an eye unto the Sun: such a quick sighted bird
should now be in this place who flying through heaven might
fetch Apollo’s harp and sound unto you the praise of heavenly
Musick.33

As John Harley points out, Bull’s reference to a “quick sighted bird”

here was a nod to William Byrd, who was Bull’s fellow Gentleman at
the Chapel Royal and who had heavily influenced Bull’s own method
of composition.34 Byrd may very well have been in the audience at
Bull’s inaugural lecture, and in any case some members of the
audience would surely have caught Bull’s reference to England’s
other virtuosic Catholic composer, who had himself developed a taste
for musical codes and had become increasingly mired in religious
controversy. With his usual talent for self-promotion, Bull understood
the public nature of the newly instituted Gresham lectures and used
it to his advantage.35

4. Taverner and the evolution of the Gresham

music professorship
Taverner could hardly have been a more different music professor
than Bull, both in temperament and in his approach to music.
Taverner applied for the Gresham music professorship sometime in
late 1610, when Bull’s immediate successor, Thomas Clayton,
resigned after teaching for only three years (presumably because he
had decided to marry, making him ineligible for the post).36 In
support of Taverner’s application, John King, the Vice-Chancellor of
the University of Oxford, wrote a letter of recommendation
addressed to the Lord Mayor and the Gresham committee. The
letter, which is unequivocal in its endorsement, is notable for its
focus on Taverner’s personal qualities rather than his specific
expertise in music:

Right Honorable. Right Worshipfull. Understanding that the

bearer hereof, John Taverner, master of arts of our universitie, is
an humble suter unto your good honor and worships, for one of
your lectures places in Gresham house: We holdinge it always a
parte of Christian dutie to testifie a truth (especially where it may
be for the good of a well deservinge person) do signifie unto you,
that he is in his religion verie sounde, a due and diligent
frequenter of prayers and sermons, in his conversation verie civil
and honest, in his learning verie sufficient and commendable in
general, and particularly verie fitt for the reading of this lecture,
havinge taken two degrees in this and other good arts. For his
modesty also, good government, and discretion, he will, wee
 doubt not, prove a good member in that societie of the honorable
foundation of Sir Thomas Gresham. Thus knowinge him everie
waie no lesse fitt for the place, then if wee had on purpose
sought for one in our universitie, wee commende him and his
sute unto your favourable acceptance, and you to the blessed
guidance and protection of the Almightie.37

The letter was signed by nine other prominent Oxford faculty

members, including Bartholomew Warner, the Regius Professor of
Medicine, whose daughter was married to Clayton. The other
signatories included Thomas Holland, the Regius Professor of
Divinity and one of the translators of the King James Bible; Richard
Kilby, a Protestant theologian and the Rector of Lincoln College; John
Budden, the Regius Professor of Civil Law; Ralph Kettell, President of
Trinity College; and Thomas Singleton, President of Brasenose
College.38 King was by far the most influential signatory on the
letter, and he did not always write such glowing letters when
recommending candidates for Gresham positions; for example, his
letter for Charles Croke, appointed Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in
1613, is tepid by comparison.39 A second letter of recommendation,
as effusive as King’s, was written by Robert Abbot, Master of Balliol
College who would soon become the Regius Professor of Divinity and
whose brother, George Abbot, would become the Archbishop of
Canterbury in 1611. Seven other fellows of Balliol College were
signatories on Abbot’s letter.
The unusual amount of institutional backing that Taverner received
in his application seems to have impressed the Gresham committee,
who quickly hired him despite the fact that he did not have an
advanced degree in music from Oxford or Cambridge or (as far as
we can tell) any significant experience as a composer or performer.
He is not listed by Nan Cooke Carpenter among the relatively small
group of students who received advanced music degrees in
Renaissance England, and his Gresham lectures say almost nothing
about the technical aspects of composition or performance.40 At the
same time, some of the most distinguished supporters of Taverner’s
Gresham application, such as Thomas Holland, were well known for
their expertise in translation and philology, further bolstering
Taverner’s humanist and linguistic credentials. In short, Taverner’s
application for the job would have made it crystal clear to the
Gresham committee that he would be a very different kind of
lecturer than Bull, who had dispensed with the Latin lecture and
likely focused on his own musical compositions instead.
Taverner’s apparent lack of expertise in composition and
performance has led some historians to disparage the quality of
music education at Gresham College following Bull’s departure in
1607. The eighteenth-century music historian Charles Burney is
unequivocal in his assessment of the quality of Gresham music
teaching under Taverner and his successors:

it does not appear that the science of sound, or practice of the

musical art, has been advanced by subsequent professors [who]
… though all men of learning and abilities in other faculties yet
no one of them had ever distinguished himself in the theory or
practice of music; nor are any proofs remaining that they had
ever studied that art, the arcana of which they were appointed to
unfold!41

Percy Scholes, in his study of music and Puritanism in Renaissance

England, likewise derogates Taverner and other Gresham music
professors by emphasizing their commitments to fields other than
music: “the professors of music [after Bull] were medical men,
parsons, lawyers—anything but musicians.”42 Adamson, the modern
historian of Gresham College, is even more terse and dismissive in
his appraisal of the Gresham music professors after Bull: “Bull
resigned his position some time before the 20th of December 1607
and thereafter the chair of music was at the mercy of nonentities as
far as the theory and practice of music were concerned.”43
The historical characterization of Gresham’s music professors after
Bull as unqualified or unproductive is misleading for a number of
reasons. First, while it is likely that Taverner did not specialize in
music at Cambridge, he would still have received substantial
Another random document with
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 SECTION OF A MINING DISTRICT.

Here the metalliferous vein, we may suppose, has cropped out on

the surface of the ground, or, as the miners say, has “come above
grass.” Let us now suppose that the position of this vein of ore,
copper, lead, or tin, has been ascertained—that is, how it runs,
whether from north to south, or from east to west—and also that the
“captains” of the mining district around have given their opinion as
to the extent and thickness of this underground vein. The next thing
is to obtain this mineral wealth. For this purpose shafts (a a a a)
must be sunk, which must reach the vein at a certain depth; then will
probably follow cross-cuts (c c c), called adit levels (technically an
“additt”), driven, as may be seen, at the lowest convenient point
above the level of the highest water of the valley; and these, in
connexion with the shaft, will serve the purpose of draining the mine
and carrying the ore above ground. It will also be seen, by reference
to the diagram, that the shafts of a mine do not always correspond;
sometimes they are sunk vertically to meet the vein, sometimes they
are commenced in the very outcrop itself. On this matter the best
geological lesson is a visit to Cornwall, where the student will see that
everything depends on the locality of a mine, the nature of the slope
of the hill, or the character of the rock in which the vein appears, and
so on. “The act of sinking a perpendicular shaft downwards to a
depth where it is calculated the lode should be cut, may seem to
require little further skill than is necessary to determine correctly the
spot on the surface where the work is to commence. But the process
in this way is exceedingly tedious; and in a mine at work, where
many galleries already existing are to be traversed, much greater
rapidity is desirable. In such a case the shaft is sunk in several pieces
(see diagram below), or, in other words, the sinking is commenced at
the same time in different levels; and no small skill is required to lay
out the work, so that the different portions of the shaft thus formed
may exactly fit when they are joined together. An exceedingly small
error of measurement, in any one of these various and dark
subterranean passages, would, in fact, be sufficient to throw the
whole into confusion; but such an accident rarely happens, although
works of the kind are common in the Cornish mines.”[21] As an
illustration of the immense quantity of water in the mines, we may
add—and this is almost as startling as any romantic fiction—that the
various branches of the principal level in Cornwall, called “the Great
Adit, which receives the waters of the numerous mines in Gwennap,
and near Redruth, measure on the whole about 26,000 fathoms, or
nearly thirty miles in length; one branch only, at Cardrew mine,
extends for nearly five miles and a half, and penetrates ground
seventy fathoms beneath the surface. The water flows into a valley
communicating with a small inlet of the sea, and is discharged about
forty feet above high-water mark.”[22] In this method about forty
millions of tons of water are raised by steam-power out of the mines
in Cornwall.
 EAST WHEAL CROFLY COPPER MINE, CORNWALL.

Here, then, we have seen two of the economic uses of geology in

connexion with granite alone; and as we think of these mineral
treasures, requiring only the labour and skill of man to bring them
out for his service and for the civilization of the world, our boast is in
our native land, which, though insular and small, combines within
itself everything needful to develop its three sources of national
wealth—mining, manufactures, and agriculture—to their highest
point. Our boast is not the warrior’s boast, which Shakspeare puts
into the mouth of one of his heroes—that this our isle is
“That pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides,
And coops from other lands her islanders”—

but rather that, without impropriety or irreverence, the words of

Holy Writ may as legitimately be applied to Great Britain as to
Palestine. It is a land wherein “thou shalt eat bread without
scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it; a land whose stones are
iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.[23] When thou hast
eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good
land which He hath given thee.” (Deut. viii. 9, 10.)
But before we bring this chapter on granite and its kindred rocks
to a close, we must glance at one more purpose served by this
Plutonic rock. Here is a teacup, and here is a piece of granite: the one
comes from Cornwall, the other is made in Staffordshire or
Worcestershire. What relation have they to each other? If it were not
thought infra dig., we should say the granite is the parent of the
teacup. In Cornwall, especially in the neighbourhood of St. Austel,
the writer has lately visited what are called the China clay works.
“The granite is here in a state of partial decomposition. In some
localities, this growan” (Cornish for disintegrated granite) “is
tolerably firm, when it resembles the Chinese Kaolin, and, quarried
under the name of China stone, is extensively employed in the
potteries. This is ready for the market when cut into blocks of a size
convenient for transport; but the softer material, which is dug out of
pits, and called China clay, or porcelain earth, requires a more
elaborate preparation for the purpose of separating the quartz,
schorl, or mica from the finer particles of the decomposed feldspar.
This clay is dug up in stopes or layers, which resemble a flight of
irregular stairs. A heap of it is then placed upon an inclined platform,
under a small fall of water, and repeatedly stirred with a piggle and
shovel, by which means the whole is gradually carried down by the
water in a state of suspension. The heavy and useless parts collect in
a trench below the platform; while the China clay, carried forward
through a series of catch-pits or tanks, in which the grosser particles
are deposited, is ultimately accumulated in larger pits, called ponds,
from which the clear supernatant water is from time to time
withdrawn. As soon as these ponds are filled with clay, they are
drained, and the porcelain earth is removed to pans, in which it
remains undisturbed until sufficiently consolidated to be cut into
oblong masses. These are carried to a roofed building, through which
the air can freely pass, and dried completely for the market. When
dry they are scraped perfectly clean, packed in casks, and carried to
one of the adjacent ports, to be shipped for the potteries.”[24] As
furnishing some idea of the extent to which this business is carried
on, it may be added that 37,000 tons of this China clay are annually
shipped from the south-west of England to the potteries, the value of
which is upwards of £50,000, while the number of working men and
women thus employed is beyond calculation. This is one of the
practical results of geology. This is one of the things which geology,
once a neglected and unpopular science, has done for our comfort
and welfare. “A hundred years ago, it does not seem that any part of
this China clay was made use of, or that this important produce was
then of any value whatever.”[25]
We bring this chapter to a close. Granite and its kindred rocks
should stand associated with an actual history and poetry, not
inferior to the history and poetry of man’s own handiwork; and we
believe geology, so often regarded with dread by the uninitiated, will
soon be considered worthy a patient and painstaking investigation.
Remembering that geology is still an incomplete science, and that we
have much yet to learn concerning the laws of organic and inorganic
matter, we should be modest in the maintenance of any theory, while
thankful for the acquisition of any fact. “We have yet to learn
whether man’s past duration upon the earth—whether even that
which is still destined to him—is such, as to allow him to
philosophise with success on such matters; whether man, placed for
a few centuries on the earth as in a schoolroom, has time to strip the
wall of its coating and count its stones, before his Parent removes
him to some other destination.”[26]
 CHAPTER IV.
THE PALÆOZOIC PERIOD.

“In His hand are the deep places of the earth.”—David.

Trench, in his charming little book on the “Study of Words,” says

of words that they are “fossil poetry.” He adds, “Just as in some
fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the
graceful fern or finely vertebrated lizard, such as now it may be, have
been extinct for many thousands of years, are permanently bound up
in the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would otherwise
have been theirs; so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the
imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their
graves, of men whose very names have perished—these, which would
so easily have perished too, are preserved and made safe for ever.”
Geology is the fossil poetry of the earth; such a poetry as those can
never dream of who in a pebble see a pebble and nothing more. But
to those who walk through this great and beautiful world intent upon
finding material for thought and reflection, there is no “picking up a
pebble by the wayside without finding all nature in connexion with
it;” and the most retired student, in search not simply of the
picturesque or of the beautiful, but of anything and everything that
can minister to his profounder worship of Him to whom belongeth
both “the deep places of the earth and the strength of the hills,” may
say of his solitary rambles:—
“There rolls the deep where grew the tree;—
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.”[27]
 We now enter upon the ancient life, or Palæozoic period of the
earth’s history, and proceed to examine the oldest forms of life, or
the most ancient organic remains found in the crust of the earth. As
we do not aim to teach geology in this small work, but simply to
place the chief geological facts in such a light as to impart a taste for
the science, the reader will not expect any minute details, which are
more likely to perplex than to assist the beginner. Let the reader
dismiss from his mind all that he has tried to remember about Upper
and Lower Silurian rocks, and the Upper and Lower Ludlow rocks,
the Caradoc sandstone and the Llandilo flags, and so on; let us
simply say that one part of the crust of the earth, supposed to be
between 50,000 and 60,000 feet in thickness,[28] is called the
Silurian system, and constitutes a large and interesting part of the
Palæozoic period. The term Silurian was given to this part of the
earth’s crust in consequence of these rocks being found chiefly in
Wales, Devon, and Cornwall—parts of England once inhabited by the
Silures, who under Caractacus made so noble a stand against the
Romans.
In coming for the first time into contact with the organic remains
of pre-Adamite creations, it may be well to entreat the student to
mark, as he goes on, the very different and characteristic fossils of
the several formations through which we propose to travel. There
will be little or no difficulty in doing this, and its mastery will be of
invaluable service in our after researches. There is and there can be
no royal road to any kind of learning; all, therefore, that we propose
to do is to take a few of the big stones, boulders, &c., that have
needlessly been allowed to make the road rougher than necessary,
out of the way, that thus our companion traveller on this geologic
route may feel that every step of ground walked over is a real and
solid acquisition. In marking the characteristic fossils of each
formation, let us suggest, in passing, the vast amount of pleasure
there is in going to a friend’s house, and looking at the minerals or
organic remains that may be in the cabinet or on the mantel-shelf,
and being able to take them up one by one, and to say this is from the
Silurian; that is from the Carboniferous; this is from the Cretaceous,
and that from the Wealden formations, and so on. Why, it gives a
magical feeling of delightful interest to every object we see, and will
always make a person a welcome visitor with friends with whom,
instead of talking scandal, he can talk geology. Not long since the
writer had a very pleasing illustration of this. He had been lecturing
on geology in a small agricultural village; there was a good sprinkling
of smock-frocks among the hearers, and he said at the close of one of
the lectures, “Now, very likely most of you have got some stones, as
you call them, at home on the chimneypiece; perhaps you don’t know
their names, or what they were before they became stones; well,
bring them next week, and we will do our best to name them for
you!” Next week, after the lecture, up came one, and then another,
and then a third, and so on; and diving their hands down into the old
orthodox agricultural pocket, brought out a variety of specimens,
some of them very good indeed, which had been “picked up” by them
in the course of their labour, and which, supposed to be “rather
kūrŭss,” had been carefully conveyed home. When these matters
were given a “local habitation and a name,” the delight of many was
most gratifying.
Now, all this is only just the application of M. Cousin’s words in
relation to physical geography: “Give me the map of a country, its
configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and all its physical
geography; give me its natural productions, its flora and fauna, and I
pledge myself to tell you à priori what the inhabitants of that country
will be, and what place that country will take in history, not
accidentally, but necessarily; not at a particular epoch, but at all
periods of time; in a word, the thought that country is formed to
represent.”
These remarks furnish us with a clue. Each formation has its own
peculiar and characteristic fossils, and these fossils are arranged with
as much care, and preserved as uninjured, as if they had been
arranged for a first-class museum. But before proceeding on this
fossiliferous tour, we may anticipate a question that may possibly be
asked on the threshold of our inquiries, and into which we propose
going fully in the sequel of this volume. It may be asked, “Were not
these fossils placed in the rocks by the Deluge?” To this, at present,
we answer, that so partial and limited was the character of the
Deluge, being confined to just so much of the earth as was inhabited
by man, and so brief was its duration, compared with the vast
geological epochs we shall have to consider, that we do not believe
we have one single fossil that can be referred to the Noachian deluge;
and before we close, we trust it will have been made evident to every
careful reader that fossils, as records of Noah’s flood, are an
impossibility; and that the vast antiquity of the globe, taken into
connexion with the prevalence of death on a most extensive scale,
ages and ages previous to the creation of man, can alone account for
our innumerable treasures of the “deep places of the earth.”
The characteristic fossils of the
Silurian system are entirely
unique. The trilobite may fairly
be regarded as the prominent
one; besides which there are
orthoceratites, and graptolites,
some members of the crinoidean
family, with different kinds of
corallines, and some other names
to be rendered familiar only by
future further study. We shall
confine ourselves to those that
our own recent researches have
made us familiar with. First, here
is the trilobite. We need not
perplex our readers by any of the
numerous subdivisions of this
remarkable animal’s
1 nomenclature; that would defeat
the purpose of this book. Any
work on geology will do this.[29]
Here are three trilobites: one (1) by itself; another, (2) imperfect in
its bed or matrix, and a third (3) rolled up.
 This most remarkable crustacean possessed the power of rolling
itself up like the wood-louse or the hedgehog; and, reasoning by
analogy, we suppose this to have been its defence against its
numerous enemies. It is a very abundant fossil, found all over
Europe, in some parts of America, at the Cape of Good Hope, but
never in more recent strata than the Silurian. The hinder part of the
body is covered with a crescent-like shield, composed of segments
like the joints of a lobster’s tail; and two furrows divide it into three
lobes, whence its name.[30] Most remarkable are the eyes of this
animal, and it is the only specimen in the vestiges of ancient
creations in which the eye, that most delicate organization, is
preserved; and if, as we believe, this little creature was living and
swimming about, now and then fighting with some greater
Cephalopodous mollusk, millions and millions of years ago, then in
this fact we have the real fossil poetry of science, the romance of an
ancient world which geology reveals to our delighted and astonished
minds. From Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise we give a drawing of
the eyes of the trilobite; and in Buckland’s words we add: “This point
deserves peculiar consideration, as it affords the most ancient, and
almost the only example yet found in the fossil world, of the
preservation of parts so delicate as the visual organs of animals that
ceased to live many thousands, and perhaps millions of years ago.
We must regard these organs with feelings of no ordinary kind, when
we recollect we have before us the identical instruments of vision
through which the light of heaven was admitted to the sensorium of
some of the first created inhabitants of our planet.”[31]
 But these are not the only fossils, or organic remains, to be found
in the clay, slates, &c., of the Silurian system. Passing by those we
have briefly indicated above, there are others of a highly interesting
character, concerning some of which we proceed to give a brief
history. Being in Cornwall a short time since, we made a visit to
Polperro, a romantic but out-of-the-way town on the south-west
coast, for the purpose of procuring some remains of fossil fish
considered characteristic of the Silurian system of Murchison, and
which have been recently discovered by Mr. Couch, an eminent local
naturalist, in the cliffs east and west of that town. We did not see Mr.
Couch, but found our way to a coast-guardsman, also a naturalist,
whom we found to be a most skilful bird and fish stuffer, and a
ranger for objects of natural history among the surrounding clay-
slates and other rocks. William Loughrin’s collection of Cornish
curiosities will well repay any traveller going out of the way twenty or
thirty miles, and they will find in him a fine specimen of an
intelligent and noble class of men. Below we give some specimens
from the Polperro slate. No. 1 might be taken for impressions of sea-
weed, so remarkably does it resemble the sea-weed thrown up on our
beaches; but it is generally conceded that this is merely a
crystallization of oxydized matter, such as may often be found in
connexion with manganese.
 No. 1.

No. 2 is the Bellerophon,[32] a shell which we shall afterwards find

in the mountain limestone, but which is rare in connexion with the
Silurian rocks.
 No. 2. Bellerophon, a shell which seems
to have been abundant.

No. 3. Remains of Vegetable Texture.

No. 3 we know not how to describe. We are not certain what

organic remains these are; so far as we have been able to examine
them, they appear to us the remains of succulent vegetables, (?)
probably the thick, soft stems of sea-weed, that may once have
reposed in quiescence on the mud of which these slates are
composed, and afterwards have been crushed by the superposition of
mud and shale, until in the course of ages, by upheaval and
depression, they have become a second time visitants of our
atmosphere, and now expose themselves to our study and
speculations.
 No. 3. (Portion magnified two natural sizes.)

No. 4. Coralline. (Natural size.)

Here is one more form of life of this ancient period; it is evidently a

coralline, which we also procured at Polperro.
Let us suppose our readers to have made themselves familiar with
these organic remains, simply as characteristic and illustrative of this
formation; they will easily find their way into other traces and
remnants of ancient life in the Silurian epoch. How absurd must
seem the development hypothesis to those who rightly ponder these
old, old vestiges! It seems to us a very idle idea to suppose that a
trilobite could develop itself into a bird, or a monkey, or by any series
of happy accidents, could become a man;[33] yet such has been the
theory of those who overlook what some writer on geology, whose
name we forget, has expressed strongly in these words: “There is no
fact which has been demonstrated more completely to the
satisfaction of every man of real science, than that there is no known
power in nature capable of creating a new species of animal, or of
transmuting one species into another.”
We close this chapter on the Silurian system in the eloquent words
of Professor Sedgwick: “The elevation of the faunas of successive
periods was not made by transmutation, but by creative additions,
and it is by watching these additions that we get some insight into
nature’s true historical progress. Judging by our evidence—and what
else have we to judge by?—there was a time when Cephalopods were
the highest type of animal life. They were then the Primates of this
world, and, corresponding to their office and position, some of them
were of noble structure and gigantic size. But these creatures were
degraded from their rank at the head of Nature, and Fishes next took
the lead; and they did not rise up in nature in some degenerate form,
as if they were only the transmuted progeny of the Cephalopods, but
they started into life in the very highest ichthyic type ever reached.
“Following our history chronologically, Reptiles next took the lead,
and, with some evanescent exceptions, they flourished during the
countless ages of the secondary period as the lords and despots of the
world: and they had an organic perfection corresponding to their
exalted rank in Nature’s kingdom; for their highest orders were not
merely great in strength and stature, but were anatomically raised far
above any forms of the Reptile class now living in the earth. This
class, however, was in its turn to lose its rank. Mammals were added
next (near the commencement of the tertiary period), and seem to
have been added suddenly. Some of the early extinct forms of this
class, which we now know only by ransacking the ancient catacombs
of Nature, were powerful and gigantic, and we believe well fitted for
the place they filled. But they in turn were to be degraded from their
place in Nature, and she became what she now is by the addition of
man. By this last addition she became more exalted than before. Man
stands by himself, the despotic lord of the living world; not so great
in organic strength as many of the despots that went before him in
Nature’s chronicle, but raised far above them all by a higher
development of brain, by a framework that fits him for the
operations of mechanical skill, by superadded reason, by a social
instinct of combinations, by a prescience that leads him to act
prospectively, by a conscience that makes him amenable to law, by
conceptions that transcend the narrow limits of his vision, by hopes
that have no full fruition here, by an inborn capacity of rising from
individual facts to the apprehension of general laws, by a conception
of a cause for all the phenomena of sense, and lastly, by a consequent
belief in the God of nature:—such is the history of nature.”[34]

LANDS END, CORNWALL.

 CHAPTER V.
THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

“The fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.”—Job.

Lord Bacon remarks, “Some men think that the gratification of

curiosity is the end of knowledge, some the love of fame, some the
pleasure of dispute, and some the necessity of supporting themselves
by knowledge; but the real use of all knowledge is this, that we
should dedicate that reason which was given us by God to the use
and advantage of man.” The historian of the old red sandstone, Hugh
Miller, to whose researches not only we, but such men as Murchison,
Lyell, Ansted, Agassiz and others, are so exclusively indebted, is a
philosopher in this last category. He does not hesitate to tell us, how,
as a Cromarty quarryman “twenty years ago,” he commenced a “life
of labour and restraint,” a “slim, loose-jointed boy, fond of the pretty
intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake;”[35]
and how, as a quarryman, he ever kept his eyes open, to observe the
results of every blow of the hammer, stroke of the pick, or blast of the
powder; and finding himself in the midst of new and undreamt-of
relics of an old creation, preserved in “tables of stone,” he adds his
testimony to that of the great father of inductive philosophy, “that it
cannot be too extensively known, that nature is vast and knowledge
limited, and that no individual, however humble in place or
acquirement, need despair of adding to the general fund.”[36]
We here enter upon a marvellous field of discovery. Hitherto the
forms of life we have met with have all been invertebrate. The
trilobite, something between a crab and a beetle, once revelling, in
untold myriads, probably on the land as well as in the water, and of
which two hundred and fifty species have been brought to light, is
the highest type of life with which our researches have made us
familiar. We are now to begin the study of fossil fish, and to their
discovery, strange forms, and characters, this chapter will be
specially devoted. It was once a generally received opinion among
even the most learned geologists, that the “old red sandstone,” or the
“Devonian system,” was particularly barren of fossils, but the labours
(literally such, “mente, manu, malleoque”[37]) of Hugh Miller have
proved the contrary. “The fossils,” he says, “are remarkably
numerous, and in a state of high preservation. I have a hundred solid
proofs by which to establish the proof of my assertion, within less
than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar
fossils of the lower old red sandstone; and certainty a stranger
assemblage of forms have rarely been grouped together; creatures
whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth, and which puzzle the
naturalist to assign them even their class; boat-like animals,
furnished with oars and a rudder; fish plated over like the tortoise,
above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and furnished with
but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish less equivocal in their
form, but with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with
scales; creatures bristling over with thorns, others glistening in an
enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned, the tail in every instance
among the less equivocal shapes, formed not equally as in existing
fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the
lower side, the column sending out its diminished vertebræ to the
extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote
antiquity—of a period whose fashions have passed away.”[38]
The old red sandstone formation prevails in the north of Scotland,
Herefordshire, north of Devonshire, part of Cornwall, and in
Worcestershire and Shropshire. Our attention will be principally
confined to Cromarty, whose romantic bay and high hills have long
arrested the admiring gaze of the traveller. This was the scene of
Hugh Miller’s labours and discoveries; this the great library in which
he read the history of pre-Adamite ichthyolites[39] exposed not only
to the light of day, but for the first time to the inspection of human
eyes, by the sweat-of-brow toil of one of Scotland’s noble sons.
Before we get into the hard names that must be connected with this
chapter, let us hear Mr. Miller describe this library of God’s books
that was so long his wonder and his study in Cromartyshire. “The
quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble
inland bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side,
and a thick fir-wood on the other. Not the united labours of a
thousand men for a thousand years could have furnished a better
section of the geology of this district than this range of cliffs; it may
be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth’s crust. We see
in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its
dizzy precipices of gneiss, its huge masses of horneblend; we find the
secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its
spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little
known, but very interesting fossils of the old red sandstone in one
deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shell and lignites of the
lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at
once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of
almost every variety of rock,—basalts, ironstones, hyperstenes,
porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the
young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose
for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the
time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without
guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as best I might, and find
out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so
much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few
sentiments were the patient gatherings of years.”[40]
Now with regard to the hard names to which we have just made
allusion—names that, apart from their etymology, which is nothing
more than “sending vagrant words back to their parish,” are enough
to startle any one; names such as heterocercal, homocercal,
cephalaspis, pterichthys, coccosteus, osteolepis, &c. &c.—why, they
will all presently become plain, and, we hope, familiar to our readers.
“They are,” says Hugh Miller, “like all names in science, unfamiliar in
their aspect to mere English readers, just because they are names not
for England alone, but for England and the world. I am assured,
however, that they are all composed of very good Greek, and
picturesquely descriptive of some peculiarity in the fossils they
designate.”[41]
The rest of this chapter will be occupied with an account of the
four most remarkable and characteristic fishes of this formation, to
understand which a few preliminary remarks are necessary. Cuvier
divided all fish into two groups, the bony and the cartilaginous; and
these two groups he subdivided into two divisions, characterised by
differences in their fins, or organs of locomotion, one of which he
called Acanthopterygian,[42] (thorny-finned,) and the other,
Malacopterygian,[43] (or soft-finned.) This concise arrangement did
not, however, meet all the wants of the fish-students, and it was often
practically difficult to know under which class to arrange particular
specimens. More recently M. Agassiz has arranged fish, not
according to their fins, but according to their scales; and simple as
this classification may seem, it is one of the greatest triumphs of
genius in modern times, inasmuch as all fishes extinct and existing,
that have inhabited or are inhabiting the “waters under the earth,”
may be grouped easily under the following four divisions:—
One more preliminary remark,
and we will proceed to look at the
four fishes already alluded to.
Neither the teacher nor the
student of any science can skip
definitions, axioms, postulates,
and so on; they must just be
mastered, and their mastery is a
real pleasure. In addition to a
marked difference in the fins, a
difference was observed also in
the tails of fossil (extinct) and
living pieces of fish. This
difference between the tails of
1. Ganoid Scale; as bony pike. fish has been happily described
[44]
in two words, heterocercal and
homocercal, of which the figures
below will give a better idea than
a lengthened description.