114 



FACTS AND FANCIES 



seeds and spores, their fruits and spore-cases, 

 are as elaborately constructed, the tissues and 

 forms of their stems and leaves as delicate and 

 beautiful, as in any modern plants. So with 

 the compound eyes and filmy wings of insects, 

 the teeth, bones, and scales of batrachians and 

 fishes ; all are as perfectly finished, and many 

 quite as complex and elegant, as in the animals 

 of the present day (Figure 4). 



This wonderful Palaeozoic Age was, however, 

 but a temporary state of the earth. It passed 

 away, and was replaced by the Mesozoic, em- 

 phatically the reign of reptiles, when animals 

 of that type attained to colossal magnitude, to 

 variety of function and structure, to diversity 

 of habitat in sea and on land, altogether unex- 

 ampled in their degraded descendants of mod- 

 ern times. Sea-lizards of gigantic size swarm- 

 ed everywhere in the waters. On land, huge 

 quadrupeds, like Atlantosaurus and Iguanodon 

 and Megalosaurus, greatly exceeded the ele- 

 phants of later times ; while winged reptiles — 

 some of them of small size, others with wings 

 twenty feet in expanse — flitted in the air. 

 Strangely enough, with these reptilian lords 

 appeared a few small and lowly mammals, 

 forerunners of the coming age. Birds also 



