EARLY REPTILIAN FOSSILS. 



246 



3om the fish is the ichthyosaur, its name declaring the 



convention of class characters for which it is remarkable. 

 With piscine body and tail, and fins advanced intoapad- 

 aie form, it has a true crocodilian head. In the pliosaur, 

 which is later in appearing, we have a stage of advance to 

 the true sauria, which come forward in the oolite, in the 

 forms of teleosaurus, steneosaurus, &c. Afterwards, chief- 

 ly in the Wealden, we have the dinosauria, which betray 

 an approach to the mammalian type in the pachyderma- 

 tous order. Another oolite saurian, the cetiosaur, exhib- 

 its in the form of the vertebrae a verging towards the ce- 

 taceous mammalia. Here there is the most perfect and 

 even striking harmony with the theory of a progressive 

 development. Below these formations, fish ; then, low 

 in these formations, fish saurians; above them, true and 

 complete saurians ; finally, higher still, saurians advancing 

 to a more elevated grade of animality ; and where do these 

 more elevated types occur ? In the next formation pass- 

 ing over one which hardly represents any but deep-sea life. 

 Nay, cetaceous relics have been found before we leave the 

 strata so remarkable for the saurians. Thus it appears 

 that the whole of this chapter of palaeontology, when read 

 by a light from nature, and not from man's capricious hu- 

 mor, so far from being opposed to the natural genesis of 

 animals, gives it support. Men, however, and of lively 

 parts too, might go on for an age misreading such palpable 

 facts, if they be determined against putting them into the 

 collocation in which a sense can be made of thern, just as 

 we might puzzle forever over a Latin or Greek sentence, 

 if obstinately resolved against making English out of it 

 except in its original construction. 



After presenting the case of the reptilian fossils of the 

 secondary formation in this way, I feel it hardly necessa- 

 ry to track the Edinburgh reviewer through all his par- 

 ticular objections. They are a mass of confusion, result- 

 ing from erroneous assumptions on his own part respect- 

 ing the development theory, as that the orders of animals 

 are all to be affiliated to each other, and every parental 

 form held as extinguished by the fact of transmutation 

 (the latter being a peculiarly gratuitous supposition — see 

 p. 50 of the Review ;) together with equally rash and un- 

 justified conclusions regarding the earliest forms of the 

 reptilian orders, all mixed up in a way that promised to 

 tell most effectually in favor of his own opinion, and with 



