LIFE OF DEAN BUCK LAND. 
[CH. IV. 
I 14 
de la Beche, who had ample leisure and opportunity to 
picture to himself the shape and habits of the former 
dwellers on this sea-girt coast, as, by the daily action of 
the tides, vertebrae (called there verteberries) and portions 
of shells and skeletons were exposed to view, or washed 
up from their bed of soft blue lias. Here the remains of 
extinct monsters were picked up or disinterred as “ curiosi¬ 
ties ” by Mary Aiming, described for the first time by 
Buckland, and restored to life by the clever pencil of Sir 
H. de la Beche. Some of the largest of the ichthyosauri 
were over thirty feet long, the jaw sometimes exceeding 
six feet. They were aquatic carnivorous animals, but 
breathing air. 
“ When we see,” says Dr. Buckland, t( the body of an 
ichthyosaurus still containing the food it had eaten just 
before its death, and its ribs still surrounding the remains 
of feeding that were swallowed ten thousand or more than 
ten thousand times ten thousand years ago, all these vast 
intervals seem annihilated, come together, disappear, and 
we arc almost brought into as immediate contact with 
events of immeasurably distant periods as with the affairs 
of yesterday.” 
Miss Aiming received the sum of twenty-three pounds 
from the British Museum for this specimen. Later on 
she discovered the plesiosaurus, another of these extinct 
monsters. It must not, however, be supposed that these 
immense fossils, which we see so admirably arranged in 
the Reptilian Gallery of the British Museum of Natural 
History, were extracted from the rock in which they had 
been embedded for ages without considerable trouble 
and perseverance; often the remains were found in a 
