CHAPTER VII 



DINOSAURS (continued). 



" Everything in Nature is engaged in writing its own history : the planet 

 and the pebble are attended by their shadows, the rolling rock leaves its 

 furrows on the mountain side, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its 

 bones in the stratum, the fern and the leaf inscribe their modest epitaphs on 

 the coal, the falling drop sculptures its story on the sand and on the stone, 

 not a footstep on the snow or on the ground, but traces in characters more or 

 less enduring the record of its progress." EMERSON. 



IN the year 1878 was announced one of the most fortunate 

 discoveries known in the whole history of geological science 

 a discovery unique of its kind, and one which throws con- 

 siderable light on the nature of the monster first discovered by 

 Dr. Mantell. In that year came the good news that no less 

 than twenty-three Iguanodons had been found in the colliery of 

 Bernissart, in Belgium, between Mons and Tournai, near the 

 the French frontier. The coal-bearing rocks (coal-measures) of 

 this colliery, overlain by chalk and other deposits of later age, are I 

 fissured in many places by deep valleys or chasms more than \ 

 218 yards deep. Though now filled up, they must at one time 

 have been open gorges on an old land surface. Into one of these 

 chasms were somehow precipitated twenty-three Iguanodons, 

 numbers of fish, a frog-like animal, several species of turtles, 

 crocodiles, and numerous ferns similar to those described by Man- 

 tell from the Weald. It it not easy to conjecture how this large 

 and varied assemblage of animals came to be collected together 

 and entombed in this one place, but possibly their carcases were 



