world from the Creator's hands. It is not the same either in its seas, its rivers, its continents, its mountains, or its plains; its climates are not the same; nor are any of the earlier productions of the earth or the ocean the same, or anything like the same, that are found on the land or in the water now: for instance, of eight thousand varieties of fish at present known to exist, and of which drawings or dried specimens are to be found in the cabinets of Europe, not one of those eight thousand resemble the fish found embedded in such vast quantities in the lias stratum in England-a stratum which was deposited prior to the chalk. This lias stratum runs diagonally across England: it extends from Whitby to the mouth of the Severn, and its course may be judged by naming the towns that are built upon it; and those are Gloucester, Cheltenham, Rugby, and Melton Mowbray. It abounds, also, with remains of a vast variety of animals and plants, not one of which is known to have any existence at this time. Further north, and in a still older formation, such as the carboniferous limestone on which Richmond, in Yorkshire, stands, the animal remains there found prove the existence of a race differing more widely still from all that are now existing. The same difference is observable in the almost countless varieties of shellfish found in the several strata which are crossed in passing from Brighton to Whitehaven. Those in the chalk, which is the latest deposit, more nearly but not quite resemble the genera found now; but they are entirely distinct from those in the oolitic hills of Northamptonshire; and those again are entirely distinct from such as are deposited in the limestone hills of Derbyshire. But in the oolitic and limestone strata the shells are not found as in the chalk, scattered about here and there and far and wide apart, and merely buried in the mass around them, but actually form of themselves the main substance of the rock. It is a chain of lofty hills composed, it might almost be said, entirely of once animated creatures.

The subject is too vast to be further observed upon here, and is only introduced in proof of great changes having been effected on the earth since its formation. The climate also seems to have undergone great change: the ferns and palms or calamites in the coal fields, of enormous proportions and of the greatest variety and beauty, indicate a climate hotter and moister than any now found under the equator; while the plants found in the oolitic series suppose a less degree of heat such as it is at this day under the equator; and such as are found in the chalk series suppose a climate temperate as our

own,

Of the extinct plants we may merely observe upon those in the coal fields, especially those in the coal mines of Bohemia, of forms and characters unlike everything now to be found.

Of the extinct animals we may first notice those of the order Lacertæ― marine lizards they might be called, and they are found imbedded in the lias and sandstone strata.

First, the Ichthyosaurus.-This creature had the mouth of a porpoise, the teeth of a crocodile, the head of a lizard, the vertebræ of a fish, and the breastbone of the ornythorhynchus; its fins were four broad paddles, and it moved as a fish by the vibratory motion of its tail; its usual length was forty feet, its food was fish, and it appears designed for deep waters.

Second, the Plesiosaurus.-There are six species of this reptile: it had the crocodile's teeth with the lizard's head, which was set on a swan-like neck of such a length that the vertebræ of the neck alone numbered thirty-three, whilst the trunk and the tail were of the proportions of an ordinary quadruped; the ribs were set on like those of a chameleon, and the paddles were like those of a whale: its food was fish, and it lived probably in shallow waters.

Third, the Pterodactyle (order Saurian).-Had the neck and head of a bird, wings like a bat, with a body and tail of the ordinary mammalia; the skull was small, the snout like that of the crocodile and it was armed with sixty teeth; the tips of the wings were fingers ending with long hooked claws.

The Terrestrial Lizards were the megalosaurus, mylosaurus, iguanodon, mysosaurus, mososaurus; creatures, some forty feet, some seventy feet long. The skeletons of these and of other extinct tribes having been found, some in situ and nearly whole, are preserved in both the Oxford and British Museums; and many varieties that we have not are in the museums of Paris and Germany.

All these, however, were more or less amphibious, and for animals that were so there is not the least need to provide a place in the ark. The case is widely different, however, with those we shall next allude to; for, at some time or other, it may be before the flood and it may be never since, there existed on the earth mammalia of a gigantic size unlike any that are to be found now. In the enumeration of the animals enclosed within the ark are we to include these? If they were preserved then, how is it that they are all extinct now? And why, if they were then preserved as useful or essential to the new world, are they not still found within it? They have been extinct, it is presumed, for many ages; and why-if there was first creation and then in the ark preservation-why were they immediately sub

sequent to the deluge allowed to perish?-for perished the whole race is nothing like them is found-nothing like them has ever been heard of as existing it is not reasonable to suppose that any such animals were received into the ark that were intended should die off almost immediately on their coming out of it: when did these creatures, therefore, disappear altogether? If the earth, after the deluge, was suited to their existence it is so still, and no cause can be assigned why they should all since have died. We must really suppose, in consequence, that at the deluge they were left on the earth, and purposely, that they might all be destroyed; and that no pairs of these quadrupeds were guided, as the others were, towards the ark for preservation. Of these extinct species of animals we may name first, the dinotherium; second, the megatherium-an animal resembling in some points the sloth, in others the armadillo, and in others the anteater. It was twelve feet long, eight feet high, and five feet broad; its feet, a yard in length, were armed with gigantic claws; but the extraordinary part of the animal was its tail, which was out of all proportion large, even when taking into account its large body: third, megalonix; fourth, two genera of large edentata; fifth, two genera of large pachydermata; sixth, a gigantic species, toxodon platensis, with affinities to the radentia and edentata; seventh, machranchenica patachonica, with affinities to the ruminantia and camelido; and many also of the families of effodientia, bradypoda, pachydermata, ruminantia, ten of the feræ, twenty-one of the glires, many of the marsupalia and the simiæ, have been disinterred lately from the neighbourhood of the Rio das Vellas river. All these tribes are extinct : at least, no living specimens have ever been met with; and supposing them, therefore, to have perished, and to have been designedly left to perish when all others were preserved, we shall take no account of these in the enumeration of such animals as are now found on the earth, and which must in consequence have been preserved in the ark; and, for which, of necessity, a sufficient space both for themselves and for the food and the water they needed must have been provided within it.

It is to be borne in mind that in the early Greek legends, such as Apollo Pythius, we have traces of a belief that monsters existed after the flood, which were speedily exterminated. Whether this was derived from their having actually existed, or merely from their carcasses being found, we do not stop to enquire. And a somewhat similar tradition, in a translantic dress, was found amongst the American Indians, concerning the "big bull" of their "salt licks." Certain it is that the

mammoth of Siberia, which was preserved in the ice, existed up to the time of the last universal catastrophe, and every believer in the Bible holds that this was the deluge of Noah; therefore, some of the species acknowledged to be extinct existed at the time of the deluge of Noah and this being established in any one instance renders it probable in other instances, and throws the burden of proof on those who deny the existence of any extinct animals at so recent a period.

ART. VI.-Histoire des Peuples Bretons dans les Gaules et dans les Isles Britanniques. Langue, Coutumes, Mœurs, et Institutions. Par AURELIEN DE COURSON. Paris: Fourne et Co. Bourdin. Londres: Jeffs, Burlington Arcade. 2 vols. 8vo.

OUR friends beyond the channel promise to gain as solid a reputation for their provincial histories as they have undoubtedly acquired for their admirable " Memoires," whether well founded or merely fictitious. In our penultimate number we had occasion to give a sign of our neighbours' craft in a brief review of M. Gozlan's history of nothing more than a provincial town, or rather something less, for we might have said of a provincial palace the lumbering but legendary Rambouillet. Since then report has brought to our ears, and the "Messageries" to our vision, each the fact of another province of France having been helped towards immortality by the pen and enthusiasm of one of her sons. The General-Advocate Raynal, of Bourges, has issued three out of the four volumes of his "Histoire du Berry." Those who love typographical lore, for the sake of the benefit which it confers on general history, are well aware that those learned men, the élite of the French Benedictines, had long been engaged in gathering materials for the history of this, their favourite province; and that the abbey of St. Germain was half occupied with the literary riches collected by the most painstaking of compilers. But just as these were prepared to give order to the learned confusion thus amassed, the consuming fire of the great Revolution reached the tranquil fields of Berry and the quiet cloisters of the abbey. That hellish flame which no opposition was, for a time, permitted to quench soon destroyed the labour of years, with the time-honoured walls in which the rare but unarranged results of that labour were enshrined. One little hour sufficed to bring to comparative annihilation both the treasure and the temple; and the

quality of the times is seen in the circumstance that so great an evil was triflingly accounted of at a season when France lay crushed and cursing beneath evils so infinitely more gigantic.

But we must not be tempted into saying more of a book that we have not yet seen this alone we will say of it in addition, that the Benedictine mantle of literary enthusiasm has fallen upon its author, and that his energy has made good all the materials which revolutionary fury destroyed but could not annihilate. If we venture to add one sentence more connected with the matter, it is because it is also connected more widely with a new class of literature springing up in France; and moreover, because, though it may possess little of novelty, it compensates for the lack by its abundance of truth: it is that French history stands in particular need of these local narratives. The ecclesiastical story of that country will be best learned by collating the annals of her provinces, and her general history will be most profitably studied by pursuing a similar course. This is more particularly the case when we refer to the lengthened period during which the kingly government exercised but an uncertain and unequal influence over the provincial cities and the provincial chieftains; and before the actual life of the nation was concentrated in the heart of Paristhe household of the king. It has been well observed by a German critic, in the Allegemeine Zeitung, that the history of the French kings is as little that of France as that of the German Cæsars was the history of Germany. Nothing can be truer. Those kings, like these "Kaisers," were but as glittering title pages to eventful narratives. There are portions of our own records to which the same simile might not inaptly be applied.

But we have to do with Bretagne and not with Berry—with Monsieur de Courson, who has completed his history, and not with the learned General-Advocate, who has yet the public for his creditor. If we have, with reason, applied the word "enthusiasm " to the Benedictine writers whose refined leisure condescended to make topography popular by rendering it the elucidator of much that was obscure in the ecclesiastical and political relations of the provinces with the Government, and of the Government with the foreign nations, we have, to the full, as much reason on our side when we say that Monsieur Courson has addressed himself to his task, and accomplished all he aimed at, with such a fanaticism of Celtic spirit as only a Celt could by possibility entertain. To give a general idea of the spirit of his work, in a few brief words, we should say that it is chiefly to prove that the feudal institutions of the Bretons

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