1808-1822.] 
BUCKLAND'S LECTURES. 
33 
Till fiercer grown the elemental strife, 
Astonished tadpoles wriggled into life ; 
Young encrini their quivering tendrils spread, 
And tails of lizards felt the sprouting head. 
(The specimen I hand about is rare, 
And very brittle; bless me, sir, take care!) 
And high upraised from ocean's inmost caves, 
Protruded corals broke the indignant waves. 
These tribes extinct, a nobler race succeeds : 
Now sea-fowl scream amid the plashing reeds ; 
Now mammoths range, where yet in silence deep 
Unborn Ohio’s hoarded waters sleep. 
Now ponderous whales . . . 
(Here, by the way, a tale 
I’ll tell of something, very like a whale. 
An odd experiment of late I tried, 
Placing a snake and hedgehog side by side ; 
Awhile the snake his neighbour tried t’ assail, 
When the sly hedgehog caught him by the tail, 
And gravely munched him upwards joint by joint,— 
The story’s somewhat shocking, but in point.) 
Now to proceed :— 
The earth, what is it? Mark its scanty bound,— 
’Tis but a larger football’s narrow round; 
Its mightiest tracts of ocean—what are these ? 
At best but breakfast tea-cups, full of seas. 
O’er these a thousand deluges have burst, 
And quasi-deluges have done their worst.’ ” 
The lecture ends with a couplet which the facetious 
writer observes of its own accord “ slides into verse, and 
hitches in a rhyme ” :— 
“ Of this enough. On Secondary Rock, 
To-morrow, gentlemen, at two o’clock. 
Another witness to Bucklands impressiveness as a 
lecturer was Colonel Portlock, President of the Geological 
Society in 1875. 
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