XXXII

Thus it is evident that this sea contains none but species known to us in their fossil state, in which fishes as well as reptiles are the less perfectly and completely organised the farther back their date of creation. Perhaps we may yet meet with some of those saurians which science has reconstructed out of a bit of bone or cartilage. I took up the telescope and scanned the whole horizon, and found it everywhere a desert sea. We are far away removed from the shores. I gaze upward in the air. Why should not some of the strange birds restored by the immortal Cuvier again flap their “sail-broad vans” in this dense and heavy atmosphere? There are sufficient fish for their support. I survey the whole space that stretches overhead; it is as desert as the shore was. Still my imagination carried me away amongst the wonderful speculations of palaeontology. Though awake I fell into a dream. I thought I could see floating on the surface of the waters enormous Chelonia , pre-adamite tortoises, resembling floating islands. Over the dimly lighted strand there trod the huge mammals of the first ages of the world, the Leptotherium (slender beast), found in the caverns of Brazil; the Merycotherium (ruminating beast), found in the “drift” of ice-clad Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous Lophiodon (crested toothed), a gigantic tapir, hides behind the rocks to dispute its prey with the Anoplotherium (unarmed beast), a strange creature, which seemed a compound of horse, rhinoceros, camel, and hippopotamus, as if the creator, pressed for time in the first hours of the world, had assembled several