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But Adams, as he gazed at the colossal bones, was not thinking of that; the marvel of their return filled his mind as he looked from the skeletons to where, against the evening blue, a thin wreath of smoke rose up from the camp fire which the porters had lighted. Far away south, so far away as to be scarcely discernible, a bird was sailing along, sliding on the wind without a motion of the wings.
Until very recently, travelers on our prairies frequently beheld the melancholy sight of laborers gathering up the buffalo bones which lay upon the plains, like wreckage floating on the sea. Hundreds of carloads of these skeletons were shipped to factories in the east. Now, to protect the few remaining buffaloes, as well as other animals, our troops patrol the Park even in winter.
Then the consumptive ones, with livid skins, trembling with fever, exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons. Then the deformities, the contractions, the twisted trunks, the twisted arms, the necks all awry; all the poor broken, pounded creatures, motionless in their tragic, marionette-like postures.
We stand agape in the British Museum, looking at the monstrous skeletons of the mastodon, megatherium and iguanodon, and conclude that all the great animals thirty feet long and eleven feet high are extinct.
Doubtless; but you know I am lecturing at present on the goffi, and not on Michael Angelo; and the goffi are very careless about clavicles and shin-bones; so that if, after being lectured on anatomy, you went into the Campo Santo of Pisa, you would simply find nothing to look at, except three tolerably well- drawn skeletons.
At still greater depths, the temperature of the mud and water would probably not be low enough to preserve the flesh; and hence, carcasses drifted beyond the shallow parts near an Arctic coast, would have only their skeletons preserved: now in the extreme northern parts of Siberia bones are infinitely numerous, so that even islets are said to be almost composed of them; and those islets lie no less than ten degrees of latitude north of the place where Pallas found the frozen rhinoceros.
Old days seemed rising from their graves to chill him with their ghastly show of skeletons of dead delights. But Grace's hand was upon his arm, and the crowd pressed them close together and she was always beautiful and divinely formed. The prospect of complete possession filled him with ecstasy, while Grace herself yielded to the love that had outgrown all other principles of conduct.
Our party had just emerged from one of these defiles and were standing together on a kind of sloping platform, at which point the declivity seemed to become more precipitous as it receded from our sight, when our attention was suddenly arrested by the reappearance of the mysterious naked footprints which I had before observed in the chamber of skeletons.
But, in deposits which belong to the earlier Pliocene and later Miocene epochs, and which occur in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Greece, in India, we find animals which are extremely like horses which, in fact, are so similar to horses, that you may follow descriptions given in works upon the anatomy of the horse upon the skeletons of these animals but which differ in some important particulars.
I should never have conceived it possible that such living skeletons could exist. Without begging from the diggers I fail to see how they could have lived, for not a living thing was to be found in the bush, save an occasional iguana and "bardies,*" and, as I have said, all known waters within available distance of Coolgardie were dry, or nearly so.
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