172 WALKS AND TALKS. 



shore. The western Cretaceous beds contain many strata of 

 coal ; and this is other evidence of water so shallow as to be- 

 come frequently dry land. The fine coals of Wyoming and 

 of the Cascade Mountains in Washington Territory are 

 Cretaceous. 



These strata are the burial places of gigantic reptiles 

 dwellers in the sea and dwellers on the land. Some of their 

 forms were amazingly elongate. Some attained a length of 

 fifty to one hundred feet. I must give you the name of one 

 of these Ca-mar"-o-sau'-rus. The bones were found by Cope in 

 Colorado. He says: "One of the vertebrae of the neck was 

 twenty inches long and twelve inches in transverse diameter. 

 The shoulder-blade was 5^ feet long, and the thigh-bone five. 

 The total length of the reptile must have been 72 feet." Am- 

 phi-cod' '-i-as had a thigh bone six feet in length and a body 

 over a hundred feet long. Marsh has discovered, also, enor- 

 mous reptilian bones in Kansas, and some of them are remark- 

 ably peculiar. I can not enter into details at this place ; but 

 by and by we will take a general view of the wonderful em- 

 pire of reptiles. 



Another system, the Jurassic, underlies the Cretaceous, 

 and we find its shales and limestones widely distributed in the 

 far west. It was a closed record before the activities of Cre- 

 taceous life began. It incloses the memorials of huge and 

 numerous Dinosaurian reptiles, and it was in fact from these 

 repositories that Marsh derived the material to give interest and 

 romance to his reptilian memoirs. Lower still lie the sand- 

 stones of the Triassic, and these are the solid tombs of the 

 hoar forerunners of the swarming dynasty of reptiles. The 

 Triassic is represented in the eastern states by the red and 

 brown sandstones of North Carolina, northern New Jersey 

 and the valley of the Connecticut. From the quarries along 

 the Connecticut are obtained the materials for the fine brown- 

 stone fronts of New York. But these stones are rich in in- 

 terest for the geologist as well as the builder. They contain 

 the records of a daily life which opens vistas into a wonder- 

 ful past where Nature is seen in one of her stages of transi- 



