io8 



WATER REPTILES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT 



and well into the nineteenth, the behef was prevalent that all 

 fossils were the relics of animals and plants that had perished in 



Fig. si.— Restoration of Ichthyosaurus with young, by Charles R. Knight. (By 

 permission of the American Museum of Natural History.) 



the great bibhcal flood. The science of geology was yet in its 

 infancy, and there was no known record, other than the biblical 

 one, of any great inundation of the earth's surface which might 



