called by the Germans roestone, and by us, if
translated out of its Greek disguise of oön,
"eggstone." And here the coiled chain of
Creation grows thicker and fuller, and the
footprints of olden times are more strongly marked
and more clearly revealed. In the various
successive formations which go to make up the
series, we come upon the pterodactyle, darkening
the air with its enormous wings and fierce
dragon's head; the ichthyosaurus or fish lizard,
more frightful than any crocodile of the tropics
or American alligator; the pliosaurus, another
old-world crocodile; the zeuglodon, or first sketch
of a water mammalian or whale, even more
clumsy and very much more vicious than the
harmless old giant of the present; the
phascolotherium, or pre-Adamite kangaroo, pouched
and hopping like its descendants; with other
marsupials, like what we find in Australia, only
bigger, and fiercer, and uglier. For, the world
was not then as lovely as it is now, but huge,
and monstrous, and uncouth—a mere seething
steaming caldron of heated mud and turbid
water, inhabited by fierce monsters always
warring together. And in this museum there
are pictures of all this, and descriptions of
everything belonging.

The next step is to the chalk formation, with
its myriads of microscopic remains and flinty
atoms of former life. And here I begin to see
the wonders of creation more fully than before.
For, there are cases full of enlarged models and
drawings of those insects now known as chalk and
flint, with the tiny originals on slides beside them,
and a microscope all ready for comparison.
Models and figures, too, of the newly-developed
creatures then swarming through the giant
reeds down to the restless seas; those mighty
lizards and tortoises and horrid toads, and that
strange walking reptile, the iguanodon—
preparing the way for the more perfect
four-footed mammalia, in their turn to culminate
in (except woman) the best two-legged thing
we know of—man. And then we come to the
rich loamy tertiary period, when the megatherium
or great beast, and the mylodon, travestied
the modern sloth, and the mastodon and the
mammoth or elephas primigenius, ate roots and
leaves, and had long trunks and clumsy feet,
like the elephants we know of; when the
paIæotherium or old beast was horse, rhinoceros,
and tapir all in one, before Nature had
parcelled off each specialty apart; when the
megaceros surpassed in size the big-necked,
heavy-antlered American elk; and when there were
huge cats, and bears, and snakes, and monkeys,
and ostriches or bird-beasts, and all kinds of
crawling things and creeping things and flying
things and slimy things; and all kinds of shells
and fishes and reptiles and beasts; when the
thick forests were dense and matted, and the
tall grass of the plains was coarse and jungley;
when land and sea were busy and full of life,
but given up to bigness, and strife, and fierceness,
and disorder, in preparation for the higher
state of things when man and his generation
should appear.

But the geological department did not show
me only models of old time, and by what strata
and progressive organisms the earth has been
made and life completed; though these were
interesting and valuable enough; but it took in,
as part of its teaching, mineralogy and
crystallography, and the mighty changes wrought by
natural chemistry; it ranged in their due order
all the earths and the salts and the metals, all
the gems and the rocks and the stones, and
showed how one substance mixes itself up with
others, and how iron and copper and sulphur,
the great magicians and colouring agents of the
world, paint and transform all things according
to their fancy. There, in one part, were the
three noble metals, with the rocks and veins in
which they are generally found; gold from the
red ferruginous river soils, or lying in nodules and
spangles in granite, quartz, and talc, or giving
value to copper and iron pyrites; silver, mixed
up with its native alloys of gold and copper and
arsenic and antimony, with chlorine and
sulphur and alumina, in carbonate and fluate of
lime, in sulphate of baryta and iron-stained clays,
in pyrites and galena, or pouring its pleasant
stream in small veins of glancing white through
porphyry and syenite; and platinum, the third
noble metal, found generally in company with
gold, its yellow-faced brother, in the rich river
sands, where its greyish-white grains lay so
long undetected and uncared for, only of late
years to be put to such uses as no other metal
could serve.

In another part were iron and ironstone;
magnetic iron or loadstone; meteoric iron in
round masses often crystallised within, just
as they fell from the skies; chromate of iron;
green copperas which is a sulphate of iron; and
crystals of iron, cherry red and very beautiful.
And near to these were the forms of copper:
copper pyrites rainbow-coloured, and blue
carbonate of copper or blue malachite, and green
carbonate of copper or green malachite, and
that still rarer green, the best of all, called
emerald malachite or dioptase of copper, which
is a mixture of copper and flint in proper
proportions; and sulphate of copper or blue vitriol,
and phosphate of copper, soft and silky and of a
rich velvet green, sometimes called false or
pseudo malachite, but marred with black spots
and lines, and not so rich as the true kinds.
Lead, as native, minium or oxide; carbonate,
which is white lead or ceruse; arseniate; galena
or sulphide; red lead or chromate, very rare,
and making chrome-yellow of unequalled beauty,
as the ceruse makes white paint fit for Titian,
but both existing for all practical purposes only
in name, imitations taking their place on the
modern palette. And specimens of tin, both as
tinstone, mixed with other metals and veining
gneiss and granite and the other early rocks,
and in loose rounded masses found among the
sands of river-beds. The first is called block-tin,
and the last stream-tin, or grain-tin, and is
the purer of the two. Then there were the
comparatively new metals: the rhodium and
the iridium, which nib our metal pens; the