70 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE. 



which printed their footmarks on the Ameri- 

 can trias, and ^icestors of the later toothed 

 bird whose tail-feathers have been naturally 

 lithographed for us on the Solenhofen slate. 

 But in spite of such rare precursors of higher 

 modern types, the saurian was in fact the real 

 lord of earth in the lias ocean. 



For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran, 

 And he felt himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race. 



We have adopted an easy and slovenly 

 way of dividing all rocks into primary, secon- 

 dary, and tertiary, which veils from us the 

 real chronological relations of evolving life in 

 the different periods. The lias is ranked by 

 geologists among the earliest secondary for- 

 mations : but if we were to distribute all the 

 sedimentary rocks into ten great epochs, each 

 representing about equal duration in time, the 

 lias would really fall in the tenth and latest 

 of all. So very misleading to the ordinary 

 mind is our accepted geological nomenclature. 

 Nay, even commonplace geologists themselves 



