Abstract
IN the dawn of history the Tartars in their flight before the victorious army of Ladislaus, King of Transylvania, scattered money as they fled, trusting to the apparently already established instincts of the Teuton soldiers that their pursuit would be thereby arrested. But King Ladislaus prayed that this money might be turned into stones, and his prayer was immediately granted. Hence the Nummulites. This, at any rate, is the account given of the matter in the sixteenth century by the learned Clusius,2 and it is probably the first mention of the Foraminifera in print. The equally learned Strabo, however, had recorded that the Egyptian Nummulites were the petrified remains of beans left behind them by the builders of the Pyramids,3 in spite of the explicit statement of Herodotus that the Egyptians never grew or ate beans in any form.4 This Nummulite, which rightfully claims to be the earliest recorded Foramini-fer, is also the highest and most complex of its order, and it was based upon his study of this family that Dr. Carpenter in 1885 claimed “for the Foraminifera that they are the most highly specialised and structurally developed of the Protozoa.5 “They stand at the summit of a long branch of the whole tree of life,” 6 and have with perhaps the single exception of the Globigerinidse, played a more important part in the building up of vast tracts of the earth's surface than any other organism. The Nummulitic Limestones (Fig. i) stretch in a broad band, in many places several thousands of feet in thickness, across Europe and Northern Africa, and through Asia by the Himalayas to China, the matrix, containing the perfect fossils, being a rock formed of their comminuted remains. The deposit is characteristic of the Eocene period; but the Nummulites have now died out, being represented to-day in the tropics by a single living species, JV. Cummingii
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References
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On Beauty, Design, and Purpose in the Foraminifera.1. Nature 95, 630–634 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/095630a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/095630a0