HISTORY OF THE FOSSIL REMAINS. 41 



eminently beautiful, full, and rounded in its form. Indeed, the 

 most splendid representations of an Audubon, a Gould, or a 

 Landseer, on their glossy canvas, will shrink in comparison 

 beside these pictures of nature-painting, brighter than the dyes 

 of the artist as set in their stony tablets, and contrasting 

 finely with the rich saffron-coloured rock in which, uninjured 

 and unstained, they have hung for ages. 



Here, doubtless, were inlets to deep waters, and projecting 

 creeks, and oozy sandbanks, and currents with their affluents, 

 and arrangements of seas, lakes, and lands now all utterly 

 obliterated. The sands are piled up into thick-set rocks of 

 hundreds of feet in height. The waters are drained off. Hills 

 and ridges of different mud accumulations give form to a scene 

 altered and varied in every feature. But the alteration is only 

 external. Everything within and beneath the surface preserves 

 entire the character and phenomena of the laws by which the 

 seasons, the tides, and the atmosphere were ruled in these 

 ancient days. The very ripple-mark is there, attesting the 

 shore-lines, the flow and recess of the waters over their silty 

 banks. The direction of the winds are to be traced in the 

 general trend of the furrows impressed upon the surface. The 

 tiny pits and hollows of the rain-drop tell of clouds that obscured 

 the sky, and even the quarter of the heavens whence issued 

 the breeze that bore them onwards. And in the vast numbers 

 and the bulky forms of the fishes there is evidence of the rich 

 provisions of nature in supplying them with food. 



How long since these things were I how very short a period 

 since they were regarded with either interest or understanding ! 

 A quarter of a century has scarcely elapsed since we had any 

 knowledge of them at all. Dura Den was a sealed-up book, and 

 all its letterpress of the deep interior, and the long antepast of 

 historic times, unread by a single human eye. A little brief 

 space before this quarter of a century, and men only wondered 

 at the strange figures which nature presented in the rocks, and 

 assigned superstitious tales and occult qualities to the misun- 



