The Dreadnought
appears in the primitive seas; the effect on the fleets of the
world of the evolution of our latest type of battleship gives us
a faint idea of the effect, on all the moving population, of the
coming of these monsters of the deep. The age had not lacked
incentives to progress; it now obtains a more terrible and
far-reaching stimulus.
To understand the situation let us see how the battle of land and
sea had proceeded. The Devonian Period had opened with a fresh
emergence of the land, especially in Europe, and great inland
seas or lakes were left in the hollows. The tincture of iron
which gives a red colour to our characteristic Devonian rocks,
the Old Red Sandstone, shows us that the sand was deposited in
inland waters. The fish had already been developed, and the
Devonian rocks show it swarming, in great numbers and variety, in
the enclosed seas and round the fringe of the continents.
The first generation was a group of strange creatures, half fish
and half Crustacean, which are known as the Ostracoderms. They
had large armour-plated heads, which recall the Trilobite, and
suggest that they too burrowed in the mud of the sea or (as many
think) of the inland lakes, making havoc among the shell-fish,
worms, and small Crustacea.
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