72 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE. 



sand years ago, when the little river still 

 flowed at this higher level, thirty yards 

 above the bed of its existing channel. I 

 have pocketed the flint after a little com- 

 mercial transaction with the navvy offhand : 

 and now I am mounting guard over the 

 mammoth bones, waiting till a relay of 

 workmen arrives from the village below to 

 dig them all out for me carefully as they 

 stand. 



It is common enough to hear visitors at 

 a geological museum say to one another, 

 ' Ah, everything used to be so much bigger 

 in those days' the exact period to which 

 they thus refer being no doubt the cosmical 

 equivalent of that familiar historical epoch, 

 the olden time. Looking about them at the 

 big fossils which form the most striking 

 features of the exhibition, they picture 

 to themselves a world where the sea 

 swarmed with gigantic enaliosaurians and 

 huge cetaceans, where the land was covered 

 with deinotheria and mastodons, where all the 



