creature's great spectral eyes must have enabled it
to see by night, while it could swim, like the
vampire-bat of Bonin, so that escape from it must
have been almost impossible. Imagine this
fiendish-looking creature rushing past at full
speed!

One of the most startling facts in the
physiology of the fish-lizards is their digestive
power. Like the shark and dog-fish, they were
furnished with a spiral intestine, like a
corkscrew put into any small compass, and an
enormous stomach, so that with an almost illimitable
power of swallow they were not fettered by
much bulk. This stomach is the most marvellous
of known stomachs, and throws that of the
ostrich, crocodile, or shark into the shade. It is
well known that the shark will swallow, for some
reason only known to himself, such matters as
bundles of shavings, large tin cases, and similar
dainties; but the fish-lizard was absolutely in
the habit of gulping down young ichthyosauri
several feet long!

Many of these animals were like an enormous
crocodile, with the body of an elephant at
least; but they were not quite such preposterous
pieces of workmanship as has been represented.
One was stated to have been dug up at Rugby
a hundred and fifty feet long. Dr. Buckland
gravely described those which once lived in the
vicinity of what is now the lake of Blenheim, as
having tails as large and as long as the steeples
of Kidlington or Long Hambro'! Now, even
the iguanodon, the giant of the wold, though
computed by Cuvier to have been sixty, and
by others from sixty to seventy feet long, really
did not measure forty, or little more than half
the size of a large whale.

There were crocodiles, also frogs as large as
pigs, and tortoises in great number, while the
waters of Margate, Whitby, and other parts of
the coast, had their great ammonites and other
gigantic shell-fish; but England does not seem to
have ever been the haunt of those gigantic birds
which once stalked over the muddy plains of
New Zealand, Tasmania, and Connecticut–
bipeds with a stride of from four to six feet,
and feet nearly half a yard long; bones thicker
than those of a horse, and whose capacious
gizzards were found to have contained pebbles
as large as marbles; swallowed either to promote
digestion, or to gratify that indiscriminate
appetite which prompts the ostrich to gulp down
every indigestible article, from a penny-piece to
a lady's parasol, or a carpenter's auger.

The sea and estuary had done their work.
The teeming life of these waters had been so
busy in forming the chalk, that this immense
deposit, extending over many counties, was
principally laid down by animals of such minuteness,
that a cubic inch will contain ten millions
of their shells. From this time, the huge marine
saurians begin to die out, and even among those
which inhabited the land, a remarkable diminution
was taking place.

The ferns no longer clothed every hill and
bank, as in the days of old; in lieu of them and
club-mosses, large forests of palm-trees expanded
their feathery crowns under the hot London
sun. Mr. Bowerbank found no less than
thirteen species in the clay of Sheppey, among
which are the date-palm, the cocoa-nut and the
areca. Beneath, grew creeping plants of the
melon order. A fragment of the day rolls by,
and old England looks like a county from the
United States, for the face of the land is covered
with the plane, willow, and buckthorn. Another
fragment, and the now familiar species of our
day appear: while, just before the advent of man,
come the plum and peach, the pear and apple.

It was at this time that the gigantic northern
elephant, twice the size of the African elephant,
fed on the young palm-trees, or plunged through
tangled woods of birch and hazel. Tigers, as
large again as the biggest Asiatic species, and
hyænas, lurked and yelled in the ancient thickets;
at least two species of rhinoceros, and three
kinds of bear, roamed amid the forests; and the
rivers had their hippopotamus, as bulky as that of
Africa. There was an elk ten feet four inches
high, and the oppossum affected classic Oxford.

England does not seem to have been so much
favoured as France, with those strange
pachyderms which at the beginning of this epoch
peopled the basin of Paris; singular beings of a
cross breed between the horse, tapir, rhinoceros,
and hog, varying in size from the river-horse
to the hedgehog. They seem to have been
peaceful animals; some, have fleshy trunks like
tapirs; others, tails almost like otters, this
appendage being in the Ano plotheria as long
as the body, and very thick.

Nor does it seem to have been the abode of
the huge mammals which succeeded them, such
as the great Austrian or Bavarian mole
(Dinotherium), which also lived by the Rhine–about
eighteen feet long with a head three feet across;
the mastodon, which once upon a time desolated
the "old dominion," some of the grinders of
which weigh from seventeen to twenty pounds,
and which, with a height rivalling that of the
largest elephant, seems to have reached a length
of twenty-five feet; the great American sloths,
one of which, the megatherium, with haunches five
feet wide, was twelve feet long and eight high;
nor the aurochs of Lithuania, unless the tradition
of the water-bull which shook the Scotch
hills with its roar, refer to this splendid creature.

These statements seem so marvellous, that an
incredulous reader may well ask if imagination
has not lent wings, even to science. How then
will he receive the intimation that vast as are
the proportions spoken of, they do not impress
the mind so much as one single glance at the
skeletons themselves? For so bulky were these
creatures, that they must, with scarcely an
exception, have been thicker, in proportion to their
height, than the modern elephant; the legs of
some, as the dinotherium, being well-nigh as thick
as the body of a small pony; and the arm-bone
(humerus) being in several animals at least three
feet in girth at the thickest part. The femur,
or thigh-bone, of the megatherium, is nearly half
as thick through, as it is long, and is above three
feet in circumference.