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The great group of Lizards, which abound in the present world, extends through the whole series of formations as far back as the Permian, or latest Palaeozoic, epoch. These Permian lizards differ astonishingly little from the lizards which exist at the present day.

The term Permian has been proposed for this group by Sir R. Murchison, from Perm, a Russian province, where it occupies an area twice the size of France, and contains a great abundance and variety of fossils, both vertebrate and invertebrate.

Unfortunately, the numerous fossil remains of Permian and Triassic Tocosauria that we have found in the last two decades are, for the most part, very imperfectly preserved. Very often we can make only precarious inferences from these skeletal fragments as to the anatomic characters of the soft parts that went with the bony skeleton of the extinct Tocosauria.

It is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform, whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian, Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong above this Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the beginning of the northern terraces referred to.

Thus it will be seen that every epoch, from the earliest stage of the Cambrian to the Permian, in the British Isles, gives evidence of the existence of volcanic action; from which we may infer that the originating cause, whatever it may be, has been in operation throughout all past geological time represented by living forms.

The granite upheaval during that awful revolt of matter represented by the creation of Dartmoor has been assigned to a period between the Carboniferous and Permian eras; but whether the womb of one colossal volcano or the product of a thousand lesser eruptions threw forth this granite monster, none may yet assert.

In the Werribee Gorge in Victoria I have seen the marks which Australian geologists have discovered of the ice-age which put an end to their Coal-forests. From Tasmania to Queensland they find traces of the rivers and fields of ice which mark the close of the Carboniferous and beginning of the Permian on the southern continent.

Other beds may yet be found, but we saw that there was not a general upheaval, as there had been in the Permian, and it is quite possible that there were few or no ice-fields. We do not, in fact, know the causes of the Permian icefields.

It is, I believe, generally accepted by the geologists that the accumulation of much of the sediments of the Cambrian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods took place in shallow water, and that the sea bottom slowly sank under the weight of the increasing deposits.

The cold-blooded, clumsy and sluggish, small- brained and unintelligent reptile is as far inferior to the higher mammals, whose day was still to come, as it is superior to the amphibian and the fish. The reptiles of the Permian, the earliest known, were much like lizards in form of body.