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Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition, if superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable impress in the immemorial rock.
It is these chelonians whom they "turn" that is to say, put on their backs when they come from laying their eggs, and whom they preserve alive, keeping them in palisaded pools like fish-pools, or attaching them to a stake by a cord just long enough to allow them to go and come on the land or under the water. In this way they always have the meat of these animals fresh.
AMPHIBIANS: Differences in structure and colour between the sexes Vocal organs. REPTILES: Chelonians Crocodiles Snakes, colours in some cases protective Lizards, battles of Ornamental appendages Strange differences in structure between the sexes Colours Sexual differences almost as great as with birds.
The reptiles, which are very abundant in this division, consist partly of saurians, referred by Owen and Mantell to eight genera, among which, besides those already enumerated, we find the Megalosaurus and Plesiosaurus. The Pterodactyl also, a flying reptile, is met with in the same strata, and many remains of Chelonians of the genera Trionyx and Emys, now confined to tropical regions.
And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown cataclysms ages and ages ago.
They watch for the arrival of the chelonians, and proceed to the extraction of the eggs to the sound of the drum; and the harvest is divided into three parts one to the watchers, another to the Indians, a third to the state, represented by the captains of the shore, who, in their capacity of police, have to superintend the collection of the dues.
And it is remarkable that the tortoises, the snakes, and, the more modern forms of crocodile and lizard, and the amphibia and higher insects, are all cainozoic some of them were preceded by more or less transitory representatives, e.g., the Carboniferous Eosaurus and Permian Protosaurus the ancient Labyrinthodons and Urodelas, Chelonians and the amphicaelian crocodiles.
Toward nightfall the mammoth chelonians some of them weigh upward of half a ton come ashore in great numbers to lay their eggs in nests made in the edge of the jungle which fringes the beach, the old Chinaman and his two assistants, who are the only inhabitants of the island, frequently collecting as many as four thousand eggs in a single morning.
It is now very generally agreed that these extinct saurians must have inhabited the sea; and it was urged that as there are now chelonians, like the tortoise, living in fresh water, and others, as the turtle, frequenting the ocean, so there may have been formerly some saurians proper to salt, others to fresh water. Darwin in the Galapagos Islands.
All the most marked groups, bats, pterodactyles, chelonians, ichthyosauria, anoura, &c., appear at once upon the scene.
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