FOSSIL, originally, "all bodies what ever that are dug out of the earth are by naturalists commonly called by the gen eral name of fossils." At present, any body, or the traces of the existence of any body, whether an imal or vegetable, which has been buried in the earth by natural causes; one of the bodies called organic remains. Even the cast of a fossil shell, that is the impression which it has left on the rock, is deemed a fossil. (Used often in the plural.) In the early part of the 16th century fossils were supposed by some Italians to have been formed in the hills by the action of the stars, a view which, prior to 1579, Leonardo da Vinci combatted. Then the hypothesis arose of a plastic force, or, according to Andrea Mattioli, a fatty matter capable of fashioning stones into organic forms. But the hypothesis which held its place longer than any other, and is not yet extinct among the unscientific, is that they were relics of the Mosaic deluge. It is now thoroughly proved that the relies are really those plants and animals, that they were nearly all of them in existence ages before the Mosaic deluge, that they are not nearly contemporaneous with each other, but differ in age by untold millions of years, that there is at least a progression among them, if not even the evolution of the last from the more antique. There are breaks or gaps in
the series of fossiliferous strata, espe cially one between the Palmozoic and the Secondary strata, and another between the Secondary and the Tertiary. Mr. Darwin showed that it is almost exclu sively strata desposited in seas or lakes which at the time were slowly sinking that have been preserved; those formed when land was rising have as a rule, been washed away. In the older strata, and sometimes in those not so ancient, fossils have been destroyed by meta morphic action, and when any rock is called non-fossiliferous or azoic, the cau tious geologist means by the term only that fossils have not been found in it up to the present time.