206 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCK!AND. 
[CH. VIII. 
grown teeth enables them to retain, like barbs, the prey 
which they had penetrated. In these adaptations, we see 
contrivances, which human ingenuity has also adopted, in 
the preparation of various instruments of art. 
“In a former chapter I endeavoured to show that the 
establishment of carnivorous races throughout the animal 
kingdom tends materially to diminish the aggregate 
amount of animal suffering. The provision of teeth and 
jaws, adapted to effect the work of death most speedily, is 
highly subsidiary to the accomplishment of this desirable 
end. We act ourselves on this conviction, under the 
impulse of pure humanity, when we provide the most 
efficient instruments to produce the instantaneous and 
most easy death of the innumerable animals that are daily 
slaughtered for the supply of human food.” 1 
Those readers who are curious to see the big wild-beast 
and the big lizard—the Megatherium and the Megalo- 
saurus—may see Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins’s wonderful 
restorations of these and other fossil monsters in the lower 
lake of the grounds of the Crystal Palace. On a pro¬ 
minent point of the lake are placed some half-bird, half¬ 
bat-like creatures called Pterodactyles, which have also 
been discovered, together with the little opossum and the 
big lizard, in the Stonesficld quarries. 2 
“ The structure of these animals,” says Buckland, “ is so 
exceedingly anomalous, that the first discovered Pterodac- 
tyle (or Flying Lizard) was considered by one naturalist 
to be a Bird, by another as a species of Bat, and by a 
1 Bridgewater, vol. i., p. 227. 
2 What a picture we might have of Old World life at Stonesfield if 
a representation could be made in the Oxford Museum of the fauna 
and flora found there, and of which no entire record has ever been 
made! 
