of which, raised hereafter, will become the
chalk cliffs of Old England. When alive,
these little fathers of families live on the
minute organic fragments which are about to
decompose, and become part of the dead
world, but, arrested on its threshold, make
the life of these small creatures, on which
larger creatures feed and grow. There is a
bird above us, like an albatross ; but if we
land now, we find but few birds, no mammals,
and not very many reptiles. There is a thigh-
bone some four feet long. It belongs to a
great reptile, the Polyptychodon. There you
perceive a turtle. There are some kinds of
lizard ; others, too, of which we shall see larger
numbers presently. Now we are at sea again,
with sharks about us. If you dredge about,
you will find star-fishes, and terebratulas, and
other things that we will look at when there 's
nothing else to engage our attention. Now we
pursue our phantom voyage farther back
into the depths of time millions of years
back into the past. Here is a huge reptile
like a whale that darts through the sea
to seize another monster with the claws
that arm its webbed feet. This marine gentleman
is the Cetiosaurus. We land in a warm,
moist country, covered with a strange vegetation,
in which fern-like palms, or palm-like
ferns, Cycadeæ, predominate. We have seen
vegetation not unlike this when we were
among men in New Zealand. There are
plenty of ferns, and pines, with a few palms.
Here is a land reptile, before which we take
the liberty of running. His teeth look too
decidedly carnivorous. A sort of crocodile,
thirty feet long, with a big body, mounted on
high thick legs, is not likely to be friendly
with our legs and bodies. Megalosaurus is
his name, and, doubtless, greedy is his
nature. Mercy upon us ! There 's a young
crocodile flying ; look at his long jaw and
sharp teeth ; he is sweeping down upon
us, stretching his long neck out. He touches
ground, not after us, but yonder little
kangaroo, no bigger than a rat. But now the
last little crocodile tucks his wings under
his arms—they work on an enormously long
little finger—he tucks his wings under his
arms, and begins running on four legs, as if
he really were a little crocodile, and not a bird.
Megalosaurus spies him ; Megalosaurus is after
him ; away he runs into a lake of water,
swimming there like a fish ; and now lands,
takes flight, and perches on a tree.
Marvellous little crocodile ! bird, beast, and fish,
as to its powers ; reptile alone by nature ;
he's the Pterodactyl, a strong, massive
creature, but, luckily, though large, he is not
a giant. For a giant, there's your reptile,
the Iguanodon, with bones about eight times
stronger than an alligator's bones, thirty feet
long, and half as tall again as the tallest
elephants. Don't fear. You are not a
vegetable ; he will not eat you. All manner of
crocodilian monsters we stumble over as we
make haste back to the ship.
Now we are afloat, look there, at that black,
muddy-looking lump of skin, with an immense
eye in it; nothing but that huge eye and a
breathing hole above the surface. The socket
of that eye is a yard and a half round. Now,
look under the water; there's a jaw and set
of teeth! a jaw, sir, six feet long. Twenty
feet, or so, behind his glaring eye, you see
where his tail works as he shoots along. The
Phantom only can keep pace with him.
There's no defensive armour on a reptile like
that; he is the monarch and devourer of
whatever he surveys in the way of meat;
and what an eye for a surveyor! He is an
awful gentleman to meet when he is looking
for a dinner, that same Herr Ichthyosaurus.
Sharks there are plenty of; but what are
sharks? Sharks are mere sprats to us, among
these reptile monsters. If you please, we will
get up that creature with a pretty shell which
looks extremely like a nautilus; it is an
ammonite. You may haul, too, for little fishes, and
find sundry molluscs, bivalves and univalves.
Lo! you have caught also a great fellow of a
cuttle-fish, who has something to squirt out of
his ink-bag. An antediluvian cuttle-fish: no
animals are of the exact kind we left behind
us in the days when we dwelt among men.
The skeleton in its tail it leaves as a legacy to
geologists, by whom it is received under the
name of belemnite.

Farther back we go into the depths of
time, and pick up beautiful stone-lilies,
animals on stems looking like lily-cups,
and having thirty thousand bits of stone
jointed within a single skeleton. There are
some fish, but fewer reptiles now. The
shores look desolate. On yonder strip of
sand run a few lizard-like reptiles, one
with a turtle's beak, and one with tusks.
Rhychosaurus and Dicynodon they are called.
But yonder walks a novelty; a frog as large
as a rhinoceros; a frog as to its large hind
legs, and its mouth; otherwise very much
a crocodile. There he goes towards the water,
and some birds alight upon the sand to dress
their feathers. The birds fly off; the huge
frog plunges in; and after millions of years
the footmarks they make now, with the ripple
of the tide and the impression of the shower
that is now falling on the soft sand, shall be
presented to the eyes of men. The birds shall
be believed in by the footmarks they have
made, though not a bone of them exist: the
reptile shall be called a Cheirotherium,
because his footmarks oddly simulate the
impression of a great human hand; his huge
bulk shall perish into oblivion, but that strip
of sand across which he has walked shall tell
his story for him.

We approach a black shore, and sail under
the smoke and ashes of a huge volcano; on
rounding a point of rock we see another. By
this time we have travelled back through the
whole secondary period, and are about to pass
into the remotest ages of the antediluvian
world. Rocks, tracts of country, hundreds of