562 THE UNIVERSE. 



With the cretaceous seas were extinguished all those races 

 of strange reptiles to whose voracity the exuberant brood 

 of ocean fell an easy prey. But at the same time their 

 mission was now intrusted to voracious sharks of enormous 

 size, which for the first time appeared in the waters of the 

 globe. 



In the same seas those families of microscopic Foraminif- 

 era, the debris of which, as we have seen, constitute large 

 mountains, swarmed alongside of the gigantic Nautili arid 

 Ammonites. 



To use the happy expression of M. L. Figuier, " the state 

 of the vegetation in the cretaceous period might be looked 

 upon as the vestibule of the vegetation of our days." The 

 dicotyledons augment in number, whilst the ferns and in- 

 ferior plants lose their supremacy little by little, and are re- 

 placed by trees analogous to those that now afford us their 

 shade. 



But if the forests of this epoch already approached ours 

 in the character of their vegetation, they differed very 

 widely as to the nature of their inhabitants. Where now 

 we only meet inoffensive lizards a few inches long playing 

 on the sward, there were then creatures of this class which 

 dragged through these solitudes their vast frames, forty- 

 five to fifty feet in length. Such were the Megalosauri and 

 the Iguanodons. 1 



1 Neither the Iguanodon nor the Megalosaurus has as yet been found in Eng- 

 land of such proportions as these. Owen computed the length of the Iguanodon 

 at thirty-five feet, but a thigh-bone was found just west of Sandown Fort which 

 clearly belonged to a larger animal, one possibly forty-five feet in length. TR. 



