NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PRIMEVAL WORLD. 



21 



years ago, or a time even twice as great, all these 

 immense spaces vanish, time disappears, and we find 

 ourselves, so to speak, thrown into immediate contact 

 with events which took place in epochs immeasurably 

 distant, as if we occupied ourselves with the affairs of 

 the previous day." 



It has been justly said, by a recent writer, that there 

 are no monsters in nature ; that in no animal organism, 

 past or present, have the laws of being ever been posi- 

 tively infringed; that the antediluvian animals were 

 neither the mistakes nor the freaks of Providence ; but 

 that in all the proofs of divine intention are indis- 

 putably evident. To this conclusion the reader will 

 have been led by our previous investigations. Yet he 



might almost be forgiven if, at his fin-t sight of a Ptero- 

 dactyle, either in a woodcut, or in one of Mr. Water - 

 house Hawkins' ingenious reproductions, he pronounced 

 it a monstrous birth of creation, the realization of some 

 wild and weird dream, a frightful and a perplexing 

 anomaly ! In strangeness of construction, and hideous 

 impressiveness of aspect, it assuredly surpasses all its 

 Liassic contemporaries. Even the Megalichthys and the 

 Plexiosaurus cannot compare with it in these respects. 

 The Pterodactyle* Its fossil remains were first dis- 

 covered in 1828, and the discovery induced Cuvier to 

 withdraw the sentence he had pronounced upon the 

 Ichthyosaurus, and award to the new-found ' the palm 

 of monstrosity." 



Pterodactvlus crassirostris. 



Naturalists at the outset were greatly perplexed in 

 deciding to what natural order it belonged. Some 

 looked upon it as a bird, others as a species of bat, and 

 others, more accurately, as a flying reptile. 



This discordance of opinion respecting a creature 

 whose skeleton was found almost entire originated in 

 the presence of characteristics apparently belonging to 

 each of the three classes to which it was referred. 

 Thus, in the form of its head and the length of its neck 

 it resembled a bird ; in the shape and proportion of its 

 wings it might fairly be likened to a bat ; while, again, 

 its tail and body approximated to those of ordinary 

 Mammalia. Add to these strangely diverse features a 

 small skull, like a reptile's, and a beak armed with not 

 less than sixty pointed teeth, and a combination of 

 apparent anomalies is attained which only the genius 

 of a Cuvier could reconcile. In the hands of the great 

 French naturalist every obscurity was swept away ; 

 every discord reduced to harmony; and the seeming 

 monster of the ancient world converted into one of the 

 most striking examples yet afforded by comparative 

 * From !rrf5, a wing, and Saxrt/A.e/j, a finger. 



anatomy of the exquisite oneness that inspires and 

 informs all nature, in its adaptation of the same parts 

 of the animal frame to infinitely varied conditions of 

 existence. 



The Pterodactyle, then, belongs to an extinct genus 

 of the order Saurians, in the class Reptiles ; a genus 

 adapted by certain peculiarities of structure for motion 

 in the air. That anterior extremity which, in the fore- 

 leg of existing lizards and crocodiles, forms a terrestrial 

 locomotive organ, was, in the Pterodactyle, converted 

 into a memjraniferous wing; while other parts of the 

 body underwent such modifications as adapted the entire 

 animal machine for the functions of flight. 



Of all the creatures whose existence Geology has 

 revealed to us, says Cuvier,* the Pterodactyle is incon- 

 testably the most extraordinary, and that which, if we 

 saw it alive, would appear to us the most opposed to the 

 present animal creation. 



* " Ce sont incontestablement de tous les etres dont ce livre 

 nous revele Fancienne existence, les plus extraordinaires, et cenx 

 qui, si on le.s voyait vivans, panitroient les plus etrangers a toute 

 la nature actueile." Cuvier, Ossemens Fossiles, vol. ii. 379. 



