338 PETRIFACTIONS AND THEIR TEACHINGS. CHAP. III. 



Wealden occur, proves that they were floated down the 

 streams and rivers, with rafts of trees and other spoils of the 

 land, till, arrested in their course, they sank down and became 

 buried in the fluviatile sediments then in progress. 



The state of the first discovered specimen of the Hylaeo- 

 saurus is in this point of view highly instructive : many of the 

 bones are crushed and splintered, yet the fractured portions 

 remain near each other ; the vertebrae are more or less dis- 

 placed, yet they maintain relation to the positions they origi- 

 nally occupied; the bones of the fore-legs have been torn 

 from their sockets, and this must have taken place before the 

 specimen was imbedded in the mud and sand, for the glenoid 

 cavities were filled with stone : these facts prove that the 

 carcass of the original must have undergone mutilation before 

 the bones were reduced to a skeleton ; and that the dislocated 

 and broken parts were held together by the muscles and inte- 

 guments ; in this state the trunk was borne down the stream, 

 and at length sank into the mud of the delta, and formed a 

 nucleus around which the stems and leaves of cycadeous plants 

 and ferns were accumulated, and river shells became inter- 

 mingled in the general mass. 



The phenomena here contemplated cannot, T conceive, be 

 satisfactorily explained upon any other supposition than that 

 which implies a long transport, by the agency of streams and 

 currents : the carcasses of the colossal reptiles must have been 

 exposed to such an action for a considerable time, and the 

 source of the mighty river which flowed through the Country 

 of the Iguanodon, must, therefore, like that of the Mississippi, 

 have been far distant from the delta which in the course of 

 innumerable ages accumulated at its mouth. 1 



1 See " Wonders of Geology," p. 444, and pp. 483-490. 



