SR&teh&tn: Its lubasicrn* mib 



By Mr. GEORGE J. BENNETT. 



gOULD any historian have written of prehistoric ages 

 there would have been thrilling records of formid- 

 able beasts and cold-blooded reptiles roaming at 

 will in our neighbourhood, and gigantic creatures 

 swimming in the seas off our coast. Nature has 

 such a wonderful book of records as no scribe ever 

 attempted, and, whatever the simple lover of 

 Nature or the man of learning by diligent study 

 and searching have discovered and extracted from her marvellous 

 museum, thereby adding to his store of knowledge, the stores of her 

 treasure-house have been by no means diminished. 



"Bones, teeth, and tusks of the mammoth" have been, Mr. 

 Hall informs us, found in the hills and valleys of Dorset. Lewis, 

 writing of the discoveries in Purbeck, mentions a " large vertebrae of 

 the iguanodon, a fragment of a femur, bones of large and small 

 crocodiles, of the plesiosaurus, and of various reptiles." " Gigantic 

 saurians," writes the Rev. E. D. Burrowes, " swam in the ancient 

 Kimmeridge seas, and the discovery of the humerus of a terrestrial 

 saurian at Kimmeridge, vying with the iguanodon in size, shows 

 that these seas received the drainage of a country on whose 

 vegetation animals such as the one whose relic now lies on the 



