22 THE VICTORIAlSr NATURALIST. 



Winged dragons careering through the air on leathern wings like 

 bats. Enormous crocodilian whales, mounted on many-jointed 

 paddles, traverse in quest of prey green depths of sea. 

 Herbivorous lizards, with horn like that of a rhinocerus 

 projecting from the snout, browse amid the dark meadows of 

 the Wealden, twelve feet in length." 



Once more we look, and the picture of the tertiary period is 

 before us. A flora similar to our own. The vast, hideous 

 reptiles have disappeared, but mighty beasts stalk over the 

 plains and tear down the forests. Mammoths and mastodons, 

 tigers twice the size of our modern ones, giant elephants, 

 great oxen, lion kangaroos, megatheriums with toes two feet in 

 length. Modern geology has shown us all this, has marshalled 

 a stately procession — armies that in serried rank pass before 

 our bewildered eyes, from the Eozoon canadense up through 

 corals and molluscs, fish and reptiles, birds and beasts, till 

 at last man, intelligent man, appears— all apparently the 

 working out of a great ideal — all an harmonious, orderly, 

 procession. 



From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 

 This universal frame began. 



From harmony to harmony 



Through all the compass of the notes it ran — 



The diapason closing full in man. 



Within this reign the microscope has been perfected in its 

 present achromatic compound form, and lenses of short focal 

 distance have been made, and with results how strange. If 

 geology has shown us a succession of worlds, microscopy has 

 revealed to us worlds within worlds. It has done much to 

 revolutionise medical science. During this era the cell theory 

 has been discovered and worked out, and on it has been built 

 the modern structure of histology — a word now in everyday use, 

 yet not to be found in Webster's Dictionary of 1852. The 

 discovery of fungoid parasites, and the part they play in the 

 animal economy, is perhaps the most important one, so far as 

 the health of the community is concerned, of modern days. 

 These are the triumphs of the microscope. 



Chemistry, as understood now, is certainly the growth of this 

 Victorian era. Amid much that might be spoken I confine 

 myself to one fact — the working out of the atomic theory by 

 Dalton from the chemical law of multiple proportions. The 

 theory of atoms is as old as Democritus, while Lucretius makes 

 them the all-sufficient cause of all things. The theory was 

 held in part, at any rate, by Bacon, Hook, Newton, and Boyle, but 

 the modern period has, through Dalton's discovery, given it a 

 new significance. Sir William Thomson has sought to fix the 



