Professor Owen on British Fossil Beptiles^ 6T 



at least wlien the stones, &c. have liad their present consiBt- 

 ence.''* 



It must be obvious, indeed, that the regular succession of 

 horizontal layers — '' beginning from the top, of earth, clay, 

 marble, stones, both hard and soft, of various thicknesses, till 

 it comes down to the black slate or alum rock,"t — mounting 

 to the height of near 200 feet above the petrified skeleton, 

 could not have been the result of the deposit of a temporary 

 ovei-flow by diluvial waters continuing for a few months, sup- 

 posing even those waters to have been thickly charged with 

 the ruined surface of the old earth. Succession of strata, as 

 of all other phenomena, must take place in successive periods 

 of time ; the hundredth layer of lias, counting downwards, 

 which contained the skeleton of the strange crocodile, must 

 once have been the uppermost; and some time must have 

 elapsed between the deposition of that stratum with its orga- 

 nized contents, and the deposition of the succeeding layer 

 above. 



If the fossilized bones of the animals described in the pre- 

 sent memoir had been drifted to this island by a flood, they 

 would be found mingled together in the superficial strata 

 usually termed " diluvial,'' and would characterize no parti- 

 cular formation or locality. But the reverse of this is the 

 fact ; and it is the cumulative evidence of the limitation of 

 certain genera to particular formations, that gives its chief 

 value to the present class of researches. 



In the most superficial fossiliferous deposits, which indicate 

 the last operation of a body of water, either frozen or fluid, 

 upon the surface of the British islands, no remains of reptiles 

 have come under my observation. Cuvier alludes to a single 

 bone of a crocodile said to have been found associated with 

 the usual fossils of the drift or diluvium at Brentford ;t but 

 no other evidence of any other species or genus of reptile, 

 which is now confined to warmer regions of the globe, has 

 yet been recognised in the British strata called diluvial, or in 

 any that are more recent than the oldest tertiary formations. 



* Philosophical Transactions, 17S8, p. 688. f Ibid, p. 789. 

 \ Dr Buckland has suggested to mc that this bone was probably washed 

 out of the clay beneath the diluvium. 



