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of the present essay if I devote a few pages to the consideration of it.

The hypothesis in question is based by its learned promulgator chiefly upon the supposed age of the beds and strata in which the remains of these fossil Saurians generally have been found, which he states as more ancient than those which contain the remains of viviparous animals; and upon the myriads which appear, when they were the lords of our globe, to have existed. But it is clear from his own statement that with the fossil remains of the Megalosaurus, a giant lizard, calculated to have been forty feet in length and eight in height, those of some viviparous quadruped related to the Opossum have been found, which he acknowledges cannot be satisfactorily explained. A fact that militates strongly against an insulated Saurian reign. Nor is it altogether true that the remains of these mighty lizards are found solely in what are denominated ancient deposites; vertebral joints are not unfrequently found in other situations. I have one between three and four inches in diameter, which, from its being cupped, or deeply concave at each extremity, evidently belongs to one of these animals, which was found in a gravel-pit, at no great depth, in my own neighbourhood; and I have seen similar ones found in other parts of the county of Suffolk. These dispersed bones seem to indicate

that the individuals to which they belonged were deposited in situations more exposed to the action of the atmosphere, so as to decompose the ligaments that kept the skeleton entire. The interment of these animals was therefore various, and evidently regulated by circumstances, so that no satisfactory hypothesis can be built upon it. When the whole globe was submerged, and the waters overtopped the highest mountains, the terrestrial animals would, in numberless cases, float upon the surface, and be deposited in countries far distant from those which they inhabited, while those that were aquatic, being in their native element, must have owed their death to other circumstances; they must either have been overwhelmed by some sudden force that they could not resist or escape from; or some cause that we cannot now appreciate may have overtaken and destroyed them.

With regard to the numbers of these animals, which Mr. Mantell thinks prove their prevalence, we can only judge of it by those that are found in a fossil state, and these, certainly, are sufficiently numerous; but surely it cannot be safely affirmed that for one individual found in a fossil state thousands must have been devoured or decomposed. These mighty monsters were more likely to devour than to be devoured; and even the herbivorous ones, such as the vast Iguanodon, supposed to be sometimes one hun

dred feet long and ten feet high! would have puzzled the crocodiles and alligators and other carnivorous ones to overpower and dispatch them.

But, in fact, the question is concerning those that were alive upon this globe at the time when the great convulsion took place that buried them. The skeletons of all that were placed under similar circumstances would be found in a similar state of preservation; their flesh would be decomposed but not their skeleton; the deluge would also interrupt all attacks of one animal upon another, every individual would be seeking to secure its own escape. But, setting aside these arguments upon the uncertain facts on which this hypothesis is built, if we turn our attention to the reason of the thing, who can think that a Being of unbounded power, wisdom, and goodness should create a world merely for the habitation of a race of monsters, without a single rational being in it to glorify and serve him. The supposition that these animals were a separate creation, independent of man, and occupying his eminent station and throne upon our globe long before he was brought into existence, interrupts the harmony between the different members of the animal kingdom, and dislocates the beautiful and entire system, recorded with so much sublimity and majestic brevity in the first chapter of Genesis.

How grand and at the same time how simple

is this record, proceeding step by step from one Almighty operation to another! each the natural consequence, as it were, of that which preceded it. When the earth was formed, and planted, and was receiving the influences of the sun and other luminaries, and thus was prepared to welcome and maintain her locomotive inhabitants, the perfect sphere of animals, if I may so speak, adapted to the wants of the primeval state of the globe of dry land and sea, both external and internal, and to the instruction and uses of man, each individual form gifted and fitted to play the part assigned to it in the general plan of Providence, was brought into existence. The supposed extinct animals all exhibit a relationship to those that we now find existing, and many of them evidently fill up vacant places in the general system, and therefore there is no cause to suppose that they were originally separated from and anterior to their fellows. It is observed that those herbivorous Saurians now inhabiting the surface of our globe, as the Monitor and Iguana, though these can scarcely be called herbivorous since they live principally on insects, are pigmies compared with their affinities, the Megalosaurus and Iguanodon; and a similar disproportion obtains between the existing Proteus and the fossil one. If any of these races are subterranean, perhaps these smaller ones may be regarded, as inhabiting the outskirts of the proper station, or metropolis of their tribe.

It appears, I hope, from what has been observed, in the present chapter, on the subject of animals brought into being subsequent to the fall, and upon those that have since that sad event become extinct from whatever cause, that Divine Providence, after the first creation of man and the animal kingdom, did not leave all things to the action of the original laws which had received his awful sanction before the fall, but altered those by which this system, especially our own globe, was guided and governed before that fatal event, to suit them to what had taken place, and to the altered and deteriorated moral state of man. We learn from the Apostle Saint Peter, that the primeval globe and its heavens or atmosphere, perished at the deluge,' by which expression less cannot be intended, than that the atmosphere and the earth were then, as it were, new mixed, so as to render the former less friendly to life and health, whence would gradually follow the shortening of human, and probably animal life; and subject to raging storms and hurricanes; to the fury and fearful effects of thunder and lightning; to the overflowing violence of torrents of rain: while the latter, from the breaking up, inversion, mixing, depression, or elevation of its original strata, and the addition of new ones from animal and vegetable deposites,* was rendered in many places utterly barren, and

1 Gr. aπwλεTO. 2 Pet. iii. 6. 2 See Appendix, note 11.

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