580 



THE WONDERS OF GEOLOGY. Lect. V. 



Batrachians. — The reptiles termed Batrachians, (from 

 the Greek name for Frog,) are characterized by the remark- 

 able metamorphoses which they undergo, in the progress of 

 their development from youth to maturity. Their organs 

 of aerial respiration consist of a pair of lungs ; but in 

 their young and aquatic state, they are provided with gills, 

 supported on cartilaginous arches as in fishes. The early 

 existence of colossal reptiles of this order, has already been 

 shown in the Labyrinthodons of the Triassic system (ante, 

 p. 550). In the pliocene and miocene tertiary strata, the 

 skeletons, imprints of the footsteps, and even vestiges of the 

 soft parts of several species of Frog, Toad, and Triton, have 

 been found.* In the papierkohle of the lignites of the 

 Rhine, several kinds, apparently of existing species, are met 

 with. In the neighbourhood of Bombay, small batracholites 

 have lately been found, in a black shale, apparently of a 

 recent date.f 



But the most celebrated fossil of this class of the tertiary 

 deposits, is a gigantic Salamander, three feet in length, ob- 

 tained more than a century since, from the lacustrine lime- 

 stone of (Eningen, in the same quarry which yielded the 

 fossil Fox previously described (ante, p. 263). The first 

 discovered specimen of this fossil batrachian {Lign. 131) 

 acquired great celebrity, from an eminent physician of his 

 day, Scheuchzer, having, under some extraordinary delusion, 

 regarded it as a petrified human skeleton, and described it 

 under the name of " Homo Diluvii Testis" as being " the 

 moiety, or nearly so, of the skeleton of a man, with the 

 bones and flesh incorporated in the stone, and a relic of that 

 accursed race which was overwhelmed by the Deluge. "J 



Cuvier, when at Haarlem, in 1811, examined this 

 specimen, and ascertained it to be the skeleton of an extinct 



* The ordinary Newt (Triton) is an example of this family. 



+ Geol. Journal, vol. iii. p. 224, 



J Philos. Trans, for 1720, vol. xxxiv. 



