nita listened
and doubted; but Daisy did not doubt. She believed the doctor told her
true. That the family to which her little fossil trilobite
belonged--the particular family--for they were generally related, he
said to the lobster and crab, were found in the very oldest and deepest
down rocks in which any sort of remains of living things have been
found; therefore it is likely they were among the earliest of earth's
inhabitants. There were a great many of them, the doctor said, and many
different species; for great numbers of them are found to this day in
those-particular rocks. The rocks must have been made at the time when
the trilobites lived, and have somehow shut them in. And the doctor
thought it likely that at the time when they lived, there was no dry
land in existence, but all covered by the sea. He would not take it upon
him to be positive; but this he could tell Daisy; there was never a
stick or a leaf to be found in those old rocks that ever lived and grew
on dry ground, though there were plenty that grew in the sea, until in
the very topmost or latest of those rocks some few bits of fern growth
began to appear.

"But what plants live under water?" said Daisy.

"Sea weeds."

"Oh! So many of them?"

"So many, that the rocks are sometimes darkened by their fossil remains,
and in some places those remains form beds of coal several feet thick."

"And are there a great many remains of the trilobites?"

"There are whole rocks, Daisy, that are formed almost entirely of
trilobites."

"Sea weeds and trilobites--what a strange time!" said Daisy. "Was that
all that was living?"

"No; there were other sea creatures of the lower kind, and at last
fishes. But when the fishes became very numerous, the trilobites died
out and passed away."

That old time had a wonderful charm for Daisy; it was, as she thought,
better than a fairy tale. The doctor at last let her into the secret
that _he_ had a trilobite too; and the next time he came he brought it
with him. He was good enough to leave it with Daisy a whole day; and
Daisy's meditations over it and her own together were numberless and
profound.

The next transition was somewhat sudden; to a wasp or two that had come
foraging on Daisy's window-sill. But Dr. Sandford was at home there; and
so explained the wasp's work and manner of life, with his structure and
fitness for what he had to do, that Daisy was in utter delight; though
her eyes sometimes opened upon D