142 



MARK rWAWS SKETCHES. 



sounds of more or less likeness to these, wherefore ye poets, conceived that they 

 talked, but poets be always ready to catch at any frantic folly, God he knows. 

 Sometimes this creature goeth about with a long stick y« which it putteth to its 

 face ahd bloweth fire and' smoke throughiye.same with a sudden and most damna- 

 ble bruit and noise that doth fright its prey to death, and so seizeth it in its talons 

 and walketh away to its habitat, consumed with a most fierce and devilish joy.' 

 "Now was the description set forth by our ancestors wonderfully endorsed 



and confirmed 

 before us, as 

 The specimen 

 tain Kidd ' was 

 tail. Upon its 

 of its face was a 

 that upon the 

 With great labor 

 was removed, 

 body was dis- 

 a polished white 

 oughly petrified, 

 eaten, so many 

 was still i n i t s 

 ed — and even in 

 " Surrounding 

 were objects 

 mean nothing 

 but to the eye 



by the f o ssils 

 shall be seen, 

 marked ' Cap- 

 examined in de- 

 head and part 

 sort of fur like 

 tail of a horse. 

 its loose skin 

 whereupon i t s 

 covered to be of 

 texture, t h o r- 

 The straw it had 

 ages gone by, 

 body, undigest- 

 its legs. 



these fossils 

 that would 

 to the ignorant, 

 of science they 



were a revelation. They laid bare the secrets of dead ages. These musty Memo- 

 rials told us when Man lived, and what were his habits. For here, side by side 

 with Man, were the evidences that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, 

 the companion of the other low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten 

 time. — Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas ; here was the 

 skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus; the cave bear, the prodigious elk. 



