On Animals depleted on Antique Monuments. 289 



If we had rejected the ornithorhyncus as fabulous, so pro- 

 bably should we have done with the echidna and the kangaroo, 

 animals as paradoxical as it, — also inhabitants of New Holland. 

 In like manner, if some artist of Herculaneum or Pompeii had 

 amused himself with giving black wings to the swan under whose 

 form Jupiter seduced Leda, antiquaries, perhaps, would have 

 recognised nothing more than an ingenious allegory, and never 

 suspected that whiteness was not a necessary character of the 

 swan. And yet we know that New Holland has given us black 

 swans, as well as terrestrial mammiferae with a bird's bill. Nor 

 in this is there any thing very surprising, nor contrary to the 

 laws of nature. Hence, then, before concluding that a spe- 

 cies which we do not now see has never existed, it is necessary 

 to be well satisfied whether its organization is compatible with 

 existence or not. We may also conclude, from these facts, that 

 since simple and natural causes may easily operate to the de- 

 struction of rarities which we suppose to be lost, it is not at all 

 necessary to have recourse to violent revolutions, beyond the 

 ordinary course of events, to account for their disappearance. 



. In a succeeding memoir, we shall solicit the attention of geo- 

 logists to those animals which are figured on the monuments of 

 antiquity, and which appear now to be destroyed. To this may 

 succeed another, in which we shall discuss the question. How far 

 are we acquainted with all the rocks and minerals employed by 

 the ancients in the construction of their monuments ? 



Does it, in the mineral, ever happen, as in the other king^ 

 doms of nature, that there are species which have disappeared 

 from the surface, and which are not now found in any of our 

 mountain ranges ? This could only happen by the elevation of 

 mineral masses, portions of which might cover minerals originally 

 near the surface, and thus remove them from our view. This 

 disappearance, then, if it exist at all, has been produced by causes 

 wholly different from those which have operated in the destruc- 

 tion of living species. The facts connected with this enquiry 

 are of the most interesting character, since they lead to the sup- 

 position that there have been considerable elevations of solid 

 masses within the times of history, nearly in the same way as the 

 volcanic fires have thrown to the surface of the earth minerals, 

 which, perhaps, but for these eruptions, we might never have 

 seen. 



