DENNIS, ON CETACEAN BONES. 
193 
waters_, vanquislied at last^ have spent their fury^ perhaps 
shuiting themselves out by their ovv^n turbulence,, or else the 
land has risen in its defence. Thus again the osseous frag- 
ments are found entombed — the diminished^ but not totally 
destroyed, remains of noble forms. Ages again roll on, and 
the Hed Crag protects them^ but not for ever, — the sea re- 
turns to the attack, and man, more ruthless than the waves^ 
seizes upon them^ and carries them away from their resting- 
place to grind them fine as the dust^ and scatter them over 
the fields, not like the sown dragons^ teeth^ to raise a crop 
of mail-clad warriors, but that they may reappear in the staff 
of life, and so fill the fields with joy and gladden the heart of 
man. To descend, however, from the regions of fancy, if a 
reality in some measure has not been fancied, let us engage 
ourselves with the facts before us. 
I have before my view some of these queer-shaped fossils^ 
as hard as stones, shining as if the waves had licked their 
surfaces for countless ages ; yet still, in their roughly chiselled 
outlines, may be traced the characters of bone^ the abraded 
cancellous texture in parts is visible, and if you break one 
with a hammer, the grain, so to speak, of bone, and that of 
some once powerful animal, becomes apparent^ the eye at once 
assures you that these stones were bones ages ago, endowed 
with life and motion ; and if a step further is gone, and a chip^ 
shivered off by the stroke of the hammer^ is placed upon a glass 
slide, and warmed with a little marine glue over a lamp, and 
then, when it is cool, ground to a fine section, the microscope 
will reveal the marvellous structure of bone; then will be seen 
Haversian tubes and numerous lacunse, and very often with 
their canaliculi in perfection, and so they plainly speak to 
you, if you can interpret their characters, what their former 
life was, and to what animals they belonged ; for no Assyrian 
cuneiform inscription, no Egyptian hieroglyphic, ever told a 
plainer story to the skilful interpreter than these bones will 
tell to him who takes the trouble to look into their legible 
characters; nor do I deem the inquiry a trifling one, for, 
indeed, it is a matter of deep interest to the geologist and 
naturalist to restore lost forms of life — and this is rendered 
practicable by the patient examination of fossil and recent 
bone. If a section of fossil or recent bone of any knoAvn 
and large Pachyderm is examined under the microscope, 
two very distinct kinds of lacunse, each with characteristic 
canaliculi, are apparent — the one sort fusiform, with numerous 
fine and nearly straight canaliculi ; the other oval or roundish, 
with thicker- stemmed, less numerous, and branched canali- 
culi. Nor are the fusiform intermixed with the others^ but 
