ROOM III. THE COUNTRY OF THE IGUANODON. 337 



If we attempt to portray the vertebrated animals of that 

 unknown country, our description will partake more of the 

 character of a romance of the fabulous ages, than of a legiti- 

 mate deduction from established facts. Turtles of various 

 tinds must have been seen on the banks and in the waters of 

 ts rivers and lakes, and groups of enormous crocodiles basking 

 in its fens and marshes. The colossal Megalosaurus and 

 Pelorosauras, and yet more marvellous Iguanodon, to whom 

 the groves of clathrarise and arborescent ferns would be mere 

 beds of reeds, must have been of such prodigious magnitude, 

 that the existing animal creation presents us with no fit objects 

 of comparison. Imagine an animal of the lizard tribe, three 

 or four times as large as the largest alligator, with jaws and 

 teeth equal in size to those of the rhinoceros, and with legs as 

 massive in their proportions as the limbs of the elephant 

 such a creature must have been the Iguanodon. 



From what has been advanced, it must not, however, be 

 supposed, that the country of the Iguanodon occupied the site 

 of the South-East of England, and that the animals and 

 terrestrial plants of the Wealden lived and died near the area 

 where their relics are entombed ; for, with the exception of 

 the shells and crustaceans, and certain marsh and aquatic 

 plants, all the fossil remains bear unequivocal marks of having 

 been transported from a great distance. But though three- 

 fourths of the bones discovered have evidently been broken 

 and rolled before their deposition, the teeth detached from their 

 sockets, the vertebrae, and the bones of the extremities, with 

 but very few exceptions, disjointed and scattered here and 

 there, the stems and branches of the trees torn to pieces and 

 stripped of their foliage, there is no intermixture of sea-shells, 

 nor of beach or shingle : these remains have been subjected to 

 abrasion from river currents, but not to attrition from the 

 waves of the ocean. 



The gigantic limbs of the large saurians could not have 

 been dissevered from their sockets without great violence, 

 except by the decomposition of their tendons from long mace- 

 ration in water ; and if the latter were alone the cause of the 

 dislocation of the bones, we should not find them broken and 

 waterworn, but lying more or less in juxtaposition, as is the 

 case in the skeletons of the marine reptiles of the liassic 

 deposits. But the condition in which the fossil relics of the 



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