OF CREATION. 175 



whose place of ordinary habitation was the open sea. 

 Its head was large and somewhat like that of the 

 dolphin, but its general form, no less than the par- 

 ticular contrivances of the jaws and teeth, were truly 

 crocodilian. Associated with this crocodilian head, 

 we find enormous eagle-like eyes, carefully defended 

 and made admirably efficient by an apparatus of bony 

 scales, permitting distant vision in the air, near the sur- 

 face of the water, and in the dim abysses of the ocean. 

 The body of this creature was perfectly flexible and 

 fish-like, but, instead of fins, it had two pair of very 

 powerful paddles, permitting of the utmost freedom 

 of motion in swimming, and forming not inconvenient 

 limbs to assist in locomotion on land. A large and 

 efficient vertical tail completed this strange mixture 

 of fish, reptile, and whale, and, though no living 

 representative exists not merely of its genus, but even 

 of the great natural order to which it belongs, it once 

 played no unimportant part in extensive tracts of 

 ocean, which soon after the commencement of the 

 secondary period covered that part of the northern 

 hemisphere now occupied by the continent and islands 

 of Europe. 



Towards the close of the deposit of the great mass 

 of red sandstone and marl which immediately rests 

 on the palaeozoic rocks, these beds seem to have gra- 

 dually changed their character, the marl prepon- 

 derating and becoming more calcareous. Although 

 sandy and calcareous mud was still deposited uni- 

 formly, abundantly, and very widely, we have in the 

 beds of mud thus preserved no distinct indications of 

 the vicinity of land, for the fragments of wood that 

 occur are almost invariably covered with marine 



