ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 317 
and exposing to the fantastic chances of the sea the beloved home, a 
world of tenderness, That small lumbering bark, which is in truth 
a floating house, will nevertheless go, ever rolling across the seas 
of the North, the great Arctic Ocean, and the furious Baltic, accom- 
plishing without pause the most dangerous voyages, as from Amster- 
dam to Cronstadt. We laugh at these ugly vessels and their 
antiquated build, but he who observes how plenteously they combine 
the two purposes of store-room for the cargo and accommodation for 
the family, can never see them in the ports of Holland without a 
lively interest, or without lavishing on them his good wishes. 
Page 113. Epiornis.—The remains of this gigantic bird and its 
enormous egg may be seen in the Museum. It is computed that its 
size was fivefold that of the ostrich, How much we must regret 
that our rich collection of fossils, or the major part, lies buried in the 
drawers of the Museum for want of room. For thirty or forty thou- 
sand francs a wooden gallery might be constructed, in which the 
whole could find opportunities of display. 
Meanwhile, we argue as if these vast studies, now in their very 
infancy, had already been exhausted. Who knows but that man has 
only seen the threshold of the prodigious world of the dead? He 
has scarcely scratched the surface of the globe. The deeper explora- 
tions to which he is constrained by the thousand novel needs of art 
and industry (as that, for example, of piercing the Alps for a new 
railway) will open to science unexpected prospects. Paleeontology as 
yet is built upon the narrow foundation of a mimimum number of 
facts. If we remember that the dead—owing to the thousands of 
years the globe has already lived—are enormously more numerous 
than the living, we cannot but consider this method of reasoning 
