ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 317 



and exposing to the fantastic chances of the sea the beloved home, a 

 world of tenderness. That small lumbering bark, which is in truth 

 a floating house, will nevertheless go, ever rolling across the seas 

 of the North, the great Arctic Ocean, and the furious Baltic, accom- 

 plishing without pause the most dangerous voyages, as from Amster- 

 dam to Cronstadt. We laugh at these ugly vessels and their 

 antiquated build, but he who observes how plenteously they combine 

 the two purposes of store-room for the cargo and accommodation for 

 the family, can never see them in the ports of Holland without a 

 lively interest, or without lavishing on them his good washes. 



Page 113. Epiornis. — The remains of this gigantic bird and its 

 enormous eg^ may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its 

 size was fivefold that of the ostrich. How much we must regret 

 that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the 

 drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thou- 

 sand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the 

 whole could find opportunities of display. 



Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very 

 infancy, had already been exhausted. Wlio knows but that man has 

 only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead ? He 

 has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explora- 

 tions to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art 

 and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new 

 railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. Palaeontology as 

 yet is built upon the narrow foundation of a minimum number of 

 facts. If we remember that the dead — owing to the thousands of 

 years the globe has already lived- — are enormously more numerous 

 than the livins;, we cannot but consider this method of reasonino; 



