Later on* came a swarm of hideous toad-like creatures, some of them as large as full-grown pigs. They were something between a toad and a salamander, with eye-teeth at least four inches long and one inch thick. The canine tooth of one species, named after Professor Jaeger, is quite an inch and a half thick at the root. As the inner structure of these teeth was of a singularly convoluted kind, they were named labyrinthodonts or labyrinthtoothed. Some of these repulsive-looking reptiles, the most revolting in appearance of all the strange creations of past ages, were as bulky as the largest modern crocodiles. At this era large tracts of the present counties of Warwick and Chester were covered with an inland sea, from which the new red sandstone of these parts was deposited, and by the shores of these waters these creatures crawled and squatted, having their day like other monsters. Five species of them have been found in England alone. Professor Huxley has now described one of these creatures from the Edinburgh coalfield.† The skull seems to have been quite fourteen inches long and ten and a quarter wide. It seems to have had a coating of plate armour, at any rate on the chest and belly, the plates on the breast being triangular and those on the abdomen somewhat like an oat in shape. Professor Huxley considers that it was an amphibian, of a fish-like form. A toad clad in plate armour, with a head as large as that of a small horse and these formidable teeth, must have been a strange-looking fish.

The New Red Sandstone. The trias, permian, and magnesian limestone, come between this and the coal measures.

The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1862, p. 29.

In the new red sandstone also of a neighbouring county lived a reptile almost as strange ;* its remains have been found at the Grinsill quarries near Shrewsbury. It seems to have had no teeth, and there are indications that its jaws were clad in a strong bony sheath as in birds and turtles.

As this day drew to a close, and the opaque roof of clouds which had so long brooded over earth and water had been purged off by the active chemistry of the vast forests of ferns and great mosses with their compeers, the sun shone forth in all his splendour, and when night gathered over the scene the stars set their first watch in the heavens and the moon assumed the regency of the sky :

"High in the hevynis figure circulare,

The ruddy sterris twinkling as the fire,
And in Aquary Cynthia the clear

Rinsed her tresses, like the golden wire ;"

The stupendous clockwork of the heavens stood revealed, when for ages and ages there was no eye save that of the great saurian, or some equally strange thing of life, to gaze on its marvels. Nature donned her livery of green, and lake and ocean began to assume their deep azure hue; for the sun did not roll quite the same at creation's dawn as it does

now.

These changes grew more marked and visible as the new red sandstone and limestone succeeded; climates and seasons began to appear, and animals seem more confined to particular regions. Tufted

The rhyncosa urus.

plants like dwarf palms,* and nearly twenty different kinds of pine, the cypress, the yew, and the thuja, lily-like plants, plants allied to the screw-pines, and some which bore a fruit like the palm, only very elaborately sculptured, have usurped the place of many of the first land-plants; for though the ferns still prevail in legions and the horsetail reed still grows by many a swamp and pool, yet with the third great day itself the gigantic club-mosses and other monsters of the vegetable world are gone for

ever.

THE FOURTH GREAT DAY.-With this change of the flora came the great lizards, creatures of enormous strength and bulk, the "dragons of the prime;" and for a long series of ages supreme masters of air, earth, and ocean.

One, the fish-lizard+ par excellence, with a head and teeth like those of a crocodile, was peculiarly distinguished by the immense size of its eye, which in some cases was quite as large as a dessert-plate. It was fitted with a strong hoop of bony plates, so that it could resist the great pressure exerted upon it, forming, as Dr. Buckland said, "an optical instrument of varied and prodigious power," so that this great lizard could descry its prey in the obscurity of night,

* The Cycadea, allied to ferns on one hand and conifers on the other, appear in the oolite for the first time. In this era begin our great forest, or dicotyledonous trees.

Or Ichthyosaurus. It began with the lias, and continued through the times of the chalk. The lias will probably be known to some of my readers under its trade name of hydraulic cement,

to form which it is simply burned and mixed with water.

or deep below the sea where we could not see for one foot before us. Its huge frame was mounted on four paddles, which, aided by the sweep of its tail, placed vertically as in swift-swimming fishes, must have enabled it to go like an express train through the waters over which it reigned in undisputed sovereignty, and also to seek the shores where it basked and slept when tired of depredation and slaughter. The reader may form some idea of its rate of travelling, by measuring the speed with which the seal cuts the water, and then comparing the seal with the model of the fish-lizard in the Crystal Palace gardens. It seems better adapted than the seal for rapid swimming, and calculating roughly must have had a speed of from sixty to eighty miles an hour, so that it could have swum from London Bridge to the Nore with ease in half an hour or forty minutes.

When it found its prey it must have been able not only to make short work of what it caught,-whether flesh or fish, but to keep a pretty firm hold of its booty when assailed by any animal desirous of going shares in the spoil, for its mouth contained a perfect battalion of powerful curved teeth. More than thirty species of this formidable reptile, which far more than the shark merited the hard name of the tiger of the deep, ravaged the old estuaries and bays.

One of the earliest discoveries of this creature is due to a lady-Miss Anning. "It is to her," says the translator of Cuvier, "almost exclusively, that our scientific countrymen, whose names have been already mentioned, owe the materials on which their labours and their fame are grounded; nor, we are persuaded, will they be unwilling to admit that they are indebted

for some portion of their merited reputation to the labours of Mary Anning."

Coeval with it lived the plesiosaurus, or original sea-serpent-also a fish-lizard, but with more of the latter than the former part-often eighteen feet long, with its immense neck reared high above the waters. which it inhabited. This singular animal had a short, compact trunk like a quadruped, fitted with paddles, and from the chest shot out his immense flexible neck which with the head formed half the animal's entire length. In a fine specimen in the British Museum the head and neck are even longer than the rest of the frame. The head must therefore have come down on any fish the animal wished to strike like a sledgehammer, or a blow from the old spiked ball and chain. called the morning star or holy water sprinkler, from the manner in which the blood spurted out of a part struck with it. In the seas where the chalk of Sussex was forming, there was also a marine lizard like the immense sea-lizard of Maestricht, or mosasaurus, but it did not nearly attain the dimensions of the Maestricht reptile, which was twenty-five feet long with a head four feet from end to end. It was while blasting the rock in a cavern in St. Peter's Mount, near Maestricht, that the remains of the mosasaurus were discovered; the jaws were attached to the roof of the cavern. The French considered these remains so precious, that when they were bombarding Maestricht in the time of the first revolution, they would not allow the artillery to be pointed against that part of the city where they were preserved.

One of the most startling facts in the physiology of the fish-lizards is their digestive power. Like the