154 BRITISH FOSSIL REPTILES, 



But what more particularly concerns us, in the relation of the serpent to our own 

 history, is the great and significant fact revealed by palaeontology, viz. that all these 

 ophidian peculiarities and complexities of cranial and vertebral organization, in designed 

 subserviency to a prone posture and a gliding progress on the belly, were given by a 

 beneficent Creator to the serpents of that early tertiary period of our planet's history ; 

 when, in the slow and progressive preparation of the earth, the species which are now 

 our contemporaries were but just beginning to dawn ; these, moreover, being species 

 of the lowest classes of animals, called into existence long before any of the actual 

 kinds of mammalia trod the earth, and long ages before the creation of man. 



