LIFE OF DEAN BUCK LAND. 
[CH. VIII. 
to recent discoveries earned for the author the apt title of 
“ the A2sop of extinct animals.” 1 
On the general history of fossil organic remains 
Buckland writes :— 
“ As ‘ the variety and formation of God’s creatures in 
the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms ’ are specially 
marked out by the founder of this Treatise as the subjects 
from which he desires that proofs should be sought of 
the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator ; I shall 
enter at greater length into the evidences of this kind, 
afforded by fossil organic remains, than I might have done, 
without such specific directions respecting the source from 
which my arguments are to be derived. . . . 
“From the high preservation in which we find the 
remains of animals and vegetables of each geological 
formation, and the exquisite mechanism which appears in 
many fossil fragments of their organisation, we may collect 
an infinity of arguments, to show that the creatures from 
which all these are derived were constructed with a view 
to the varying conditions of the surface of the earth, and to 
its gradually increasing capabilities of sustaining more com¬ 
plex forms of organic life, advancing through successive 
stages of perfection. Few facts are more remarkable in the 
history of the progress of human discovery, than that it 
should have been reserved almost entirely for the researches 
1 Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins, after a continuous mental and bodily 
labour of more than three years, presented to the public notice in 
the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham restorations of no less 
than thirty-three extinct animals, known to us only by their fossil 
remains. He told Mr. Frank Buckland that in modelling his restora¬ 
tions he had received the greatest assistance from the Plates in the 
Bridgewater Treatise, many of which were drawn by Mrs. Buckland. 
Mr. W. Hawkins gave to Mrs. Buckland the original sketch from his 
own pencil, which is here reproduced, of his marvellous models of 
ancient marine saurians, the originals of which are now at Sydenham. 
For description see Bridgewater, p. 38. 
