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Another distinguished palaeontologist, M. Gaudry, has shown in the most striking manner that many of the fossil mammals discovered by him in Attica serve to break down the intervals between existing genera.
On the supposition of the fossil horse still existing as a rare species, we might have felt certain from the analogy of all other mammals, even of the slow-breeding elephant, and from the history of the naturalisation of the domestic horse in South America, that under more favourable conditions it would in a very few years have stocked the whole continent.
Fergus graciously received the introduction; and the next sound that was heard was, "Have you any good fossils about you?" in a tone as if he doubted whether so small a boy knew what a fossil meant; but little Felix was equal to the occasion. "I once found a shepherd's crown, and father said it was a fossil sea-urchin, and that they are alive sometimes." "Echini. Oh yes- recent, you mean.
Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here was the skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the prodigious elk. Here, also, were the charred bones of some of these extinct animals and of the young of Man's own species, split lengthwise, showing that to his taste the marrow was a toothsome luxury.
I doubt if any inhabitant of Cincinnati ever mounted these hills so often as myself and my children; but it was rather for the enjoyment of a freer air than for any beauty of prospect, that we took our daily climb. These hills afford neither shrubs nor flowers, but furnish the finest specimens of millepore in the world; and the water courses are full of fossil productions.
Great pains was also taken during the summer to measure the advance in every twenty-four hours, as well as to compare the diurnal with the nocturnal movement, and to ascertain the amount of surface waste. The season was an unfavorable one, beginning so late and continuing so cold that the period of work was shortened. Completion of Fossil Fishes. Followed by Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone.
The fossil remains previously referred to are of course only a few of the most important, but it is remarked as a curious and notable fact that among the fossils of the lower orders of life in the Bad Lands, the heads have not been preserved.
Can we find any point in his history where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and his supernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with the pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with the low-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java, Pithecanthropus erectus, described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail?
In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter, Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its secondary age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk period or earlier ages.
I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of fossil carbon. When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the arrival on the battle-field of the Son,
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