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It includes an Azoic age, previous to the appearance of life, and an Eozoic age, including the earliest forms of life. µ This is equivalent to the formerly accepted term Azoic, and to the Eozoic of Dawson.

I know that if one walks far enough past the Library, in the direction in which the lady with the black ball is looking, one will eventually come to Commonwealth Avenue, where eozoic cabbies may be seen.

Certain it is, that according to present appearances we have a new beginning in the Cambrian, which introduces the great Palæozoic age, and few links of connection are known between this and the previous Eozoic.

At the beginning of the Palæozoic we have reason to believe that our continents were slowly subsiding under the sea, after a period of general continental elevation which was consequent on the crumbling of the earth’s crust at the close of the Eozoic; and on the new sea-bottoms formed by this subsidence came in, slowly at first, but in ever-increasing swarms, the abundant and varied life of the early Palæozoic.

These facts at least allow us to suppose that in the Eozoic times there were great supplies of carbon and of lime available to such creatures of low organisation as were capable of profiting by them; and we have no reason to doubt that there may have been plants and animals so constituted as to flourish in conditions of this kind, in which perhaps scarcely any modern species could exist.