A Period in the History of our Planet. 



sea and land reptiles : the Nothosaurus and Dracosaurus, two 

 large sea lizards, allied to the Plesiosaurus, hunted for their 

 prey in the high seas, whilst other salamander-like species, as 

 the Labyrinthodon, watched for their food upon the shore. As 

 yet the other family types of the Amphibia are wanting ; it is 

 with the Jura formation that these first gradually come into 

 life. The trilobites have already vanished, and are succeeded 

 by beautiful extinct families of long-tailed crabs ; the stalked 

 cncrinites, those animal water-lilies of the ancient ocean, are 

 developed in their loveliest bloom. Exquisitacese, Coniferae, 

 and Cycadea), together with a fow ferns, covered the soil. 



The interior of the earth raged anew. As parallel dams the 

 mountain ranges of the Black Forest and the Vosges arose, to- 

 gether with those of the Thuringian and Bohemian forests, to 

 bound the shores of the Jurassic sea, in which a new life com- 

 menced. The mighty Ichthyosauri, whose organization, as the 

 name implies, comes so near to that of a fish ; the long-necked 

 Plesiosauri, with their short paddles ; the Pterodactyles, to 

 which the majority of naturalists still assign an improper place, 

 regarding them as aerial animals, as flying reptiles, whilst their 

 whole organization shews them to have been aquatic animals ; 

 these animals, termed by Cuvier the most bizarre of the whole 

 early creation, inhabited the waters of the extensive oceans. 



In conformity with their whole constitution, these, in many 

 instances, gigantic devourers had to seek their food amongst 

 the fishes of the sea ; and we can still recognise in the copro- 

 lites, their petrified excrement, the scales and bones of the 

 fishes and reptiles which served as their nourishment, and, 

 from the mass which fills up their ribs, infer the extent of their 

 stomach and their appetite. In contest with these, innumer- 

 able hobts of sharks and other animals, approaching nearer to 

 the present race of fishes, but still belonging to the classes of 

 Ganoidians and Placoidians, ragged through the waves. Num- 

 berless masses of naked cuttle-fish, whose back bones form, as 

 belemnites, extensive stony strata, and give evidence of the 

 immense mass which existed of these creatures, meet us here 

 for the first time ; they appear anxious to supplant the family 

 of Brachiopoda with chambered cells, which peopled the ancient 



