REPTILES ABUNDANT. 67 



The imagination eagerly aspires to picture the world of the 

 Oolitic Era, when there were scarcely any living creatures 

 of more exalted character than reptiles. There were then 

 vast tracts of dry land, as now ; their surface bore a luxuriant 

 vegetation of no mean kind. The meteoric agencies, the rise 

 and fall of tides, were common phenomena of that time, as of 

 the present. Day after day, through long drawn ages, the 

 sun passed on his course. Night after night, the sparkling 

 garniture of the sky looked down on this green world. But 

 a being of superhuman intelligence, coming to examine our 

 globe, would have seen all this existing only for fishes and 

 still humbler creatures in the sea, and for reptiles, insects, 

 and perhaps a few birds, and still fewer opossums, upon land. 

 He would have beheld the tyrant sauria pursuing their car- 

 nivorous instincts upon the wave, upon the shore, and even in 

 the air ; huge turtles creeping along the muddy coasts ; still 

 more huge megalosaurs traversing the plain ; frog-like ani- 

 mals of the bulk of modern boars, croaking in the marshes ; 

 and with all this, the air filled with multitudes of insects. 

 But no flocks would have met his eye upon the mountains, 

 no herds quietly roaming in the valleys. He would encounter 

 no tiger or elephant in the jungle. None of the smaller mam- 

 malian quadrupeds, as the dog, the genet, the hedgehog, the 

 hare, the mole, would have presented themselves. And not 

 only were no human beings to be seen, but our supernatural 

 visitant would know that this scene must lie spread out in 

 perfect capability for their reception, during ages upon ages, 

 before such beings were to exist; the stream flowing and 

 glittering in the sun, but not to cheer the eye of man ; the 

 season passing, but not to yield its fruit to him ; the whole 

 jocund earth spread out in unenjoyed beauty, as yet unwitting 

 of the glory and the gloom which human impulses were to 

 bring upon it. How strange to reflect on the contemplations 

 of the supposed visitant. What a vast void ! What a stretch 

 of time before there was to be even a commencement to its 

 proper filling ! And yet the certainty that in good time, in 

 the ripeness of the plans of the mighty Author, the higher 

 animals were to come, and among the last the Creature of 

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