same hand, bearing the manifest impress of the same mighty mind, and equally abounding in new and vivid proofs of the wisdom and goodness of their Author.

Before he enters into particular instances of design, the Doctor, in his thirteenth chapter, takes a general view of what he designates as 'the police of ancient nature' (a term already applied by Wilcke and others to modern natural history). In the world of our day, no observer can look around him without seeing the conflicting principles of life and death in constant action. The greatest amount of general happiness in a given space appears to be the object aimed at; the extinction of individuals is essential to this end-one generation must disappear to afford room for another. Thus we see swarms of gnats dancing in the sunbeams-swallows dash through and annihilate myriads—but still

in spite of all the devastation committed on them, the insect-tribes are kept up to the full complement which is compatible with the welfare of other orders of the animal creation. Still, as some of the most important provisions in the anatomy of the ancient as well as the modern animals are made manifest in the organs with which they were furnished for capturing their prey-and as contrivances for such a purpose may, at first sight, seem inconsistent with the dispensations of a creation founded in benevolence, and tending to produce the greatest amount of animal gratification, Dr. Buckland is naturally led to show how the aggregate of animal enjoyment is increased, and that of pain diminished, by the exist

ence of the carnivorous races :

To the mind which looks not to general results in the economy of nature, the earth may seem to present a scene of perpetual warfare and incessant carnage: but the more enlarged view, while it regards individuals in their conjoint relations to the general benefit of their own species, and that of other species with which they are associated in the great family of nature, resolves each apparent case of individual evil into an example of subserviency to universal good.

Under the existing system, not only is the aggregate amount of animal enjoyment much increased, by adding to the stock of life all the races which are carnivorous, but these are also highly beneficial even to the herbivorous races that are subject to their dominion.

'The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora, as the ordinary termination of animal existence, deducts much from the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and imposes such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that

the

the surface of the land and depths of the waters are ever crowded with myriads of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its duration; and which, throughout the little day of existence that is allotted to them, fulfil with joy the functions for which they were created. Life to each individual is a scene of continued feasting, in a region of plenty; and when unexpected death arrests its course, it repays with small interest the large debt which it has contracted to the common fund of animal nutrition, from whence the materials of its body have been derived. Thus the great drama of universal life is perpetually sustained; and though the individual actors undergo continual change, the same parts are ever filled by another and another generation; renewing the face of the earth, and the bosom of the deep, with endless successions of life and happiness." -pp. 131-134.

Having prepared the way by these general considerations, the author presents us with the particular instances of design exhibited in the organization of the ancient mammalians-animals that suckle their young-whose bones have been disinterred by the geologist from their primeval sepulchres. He selects the uncouth dinotherium and the megatherium with its columnar hind legs and colossal tail;' and, after passing in review the organization of their admirably constructed bodies, thus sums up the evidence afforded by the latter :

"With the head and shoulders of a sloth, it combined in its legs and feet an admixture of the characters of the ant-eater, the armadillo, and the chlamyphorus it probably also still further resembled the armadillo and chlamyphorus, in being cased with a bony coat of armour. Its haunches were more than five feet wide, and its body twelve feet long and eight feet high; its feet were a yard in length, and terminated by most gigantic claws; its tail was probably clad in armour, and much larger than the tail of any other beast, among extinct or living terrestrial mammalia. Thus heavily constructed, and ponderously accoutred, it could neither run, nor leap, nor climb, nor burrow under the ground, and in all its movements must have been necessarily slow; but what need of rapid locomotion to an animal whose occupation of digging roots for food was almost stationary? and what need of speed for flight from foes to a creature whose giant carcase was encased in an impenetrable cuirass, and who by a single pat of his paw, or lash of his tail, could in an instant have demolished the couguar or the crocodile? Secure within the panoply of his bony armour, where was the enemy that would dare encounter this leviathan of the Pampas? or in what more powerful creature can we find the cause that has effected the extirpation of his race?

His entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, adapted exactly to the work it had to do; strong and ponderous in proportion as this work was heavy, and calculated to be the vehicle of life and enjoyment to a gigantic race of quadrupeds; which, though they have

ceased

ceased to be counted among the living inhabitants of our planet, have, in their fossil bones, left behind them imperishable monuments of the consummate skill with which they were constructed;-each limb, and fragment of a limb, forming co-ordinate parts of a welladjusted and perfect whole; and through all their deviations from the form and proportion of the limbs of other quadrupeds, affording fresh proofs of the infinitely varied, and inexhaustible contrivances of creative wisdom.'-pp. 163, 164.

We are next carried back to those distant ages during the formation of the strata of the secondary series, when so large a field was occupied by extinct animals, referable to the order of Saurians or lizards, An age of reptiles, when neither the carnivorous nor lacustrine mammalia of the tertiary periods had begun to appear; but the most formidable occupants, both of land and water, were crocodiles and lizards; of various forms, and often of gigantic stature, fitted to endure the turbulence and continual convulsions of the unquiet surface of our infant world.'_At this period what are now the temperate regions of southern England (the Weald of Sussex and Dorsetshire, for example) were peopled by monsters of this character, which stalked amid marshy forests of a luxuriant tropical vegetation, or floated huge on the genial waters,

'Their earth is gone for ever.'

Persons to whom this subject may now be presented for the first time will receive, with much surprise, perhaps almost with incredulity, such statements as are here advanced. It must be admitted that they at first seem much more like the dreams of fiction and romance than the sober results of calm and deliberate investigation; but to those who will examine the evidence of facts upon which the conclusions rest, there can remain no more reasonable doubt of the former existence of these strange and curious creatures, in the times and places assigned to them, than is felt by the antiquary, who, finding the catacombs of Egypt stored with the mummies of men and apes and crocodiles, concludes them to be the remains of mammalia and reptiles that have formed part of an ancient population on the banks of the Nile.

Beginning with the Enaliosaurians or marine lizards, which are most abundant throughout the lias and oolite formations of the secondary series, our author first presents us with the Ichthyosaurus or fish-lizard. Let the reader who has not made palæontology his pursuit imagine a marine creature with the snout of a porpoise, the teeth of a crocodile, the head of a lizard, the vertebræ of a fish, and the breast-bone of that paradoxical animal of New Holland, the ornithorhynchus.* Let him suppose this frame-work to

* A quadruped with webbed feet and a bill like a duck's, clothed with fur, suckling its young, and oviparous.

be

be so filled up as to give the general outline of a modern porpoise or grampus, with an enormous eye, and add thereto four broad fin-feet or paddles, with a long and powerful tail; let him imagine all this upon a scale of thirty or forty feet in length, (for some of the largest of the species must have been, at least, so long,) and he will have no very incorrect idea of an ichthyosaurus. Throughout the whole organization of this tyrant of the seas of a former world, a perfect harmony of parts is obvious, while the parts themselves—the eyes, the jaws, the vertebræ, the sternal apparatus, for example-exhibit the most consummate adaptation. But we must permit Dr. Buckland to give his own conclusion :—

'If the laws of co-existence are less rigidly maintained in the ichthyosaurus than in other extinct creatures which we discover amid the wreck of former creations, still these deviations are so far from being fortuitous or evidencing imperfection, that they present examples of perfect appointment and judicious choice, pervading and regulating even the most apparently anomalous aberrations.

Having the vertebræ of a fish, as instruments of rapid progression, and the paddles of a whale, and sternum of an ornithorhyncus, as instruments of elevation and depression, the reptile ichthyosaurus united in itself a combination of mechanical contrivances, which are now distributed among three distinct classes of the animal kingdom. If, for the purpose of producing vertical movements in the water, the sternum of the living ornithorhyncus assumes forms and combinations that occur but in one other genus of mammalia, they are the same that co-existed in the sternum of the ichthyosaurus of the ancient world; and thus, at points of time separated from each other by the intervention of incalculable ages, we find an identity of objects effected by instruments so similar, as to leave no doubt of the unity of the design in which they all originated.

It was a necessary and peculiar function in the economy of the fish-like lizard of the ancient seas to ascend continually to the surface of the water in order to breathe air, and to descend again in search of food: it is a no less peculiar function in the duck-billed ornithorhynchus of our own days to perform a series of similar movements in the lakes and rivers of New Holland.

'The introduction in these animals of such aberrations from the type of their respective orders, to accommodate deviations from the usual habits of these orders, exhibits an union of compensative contrivances, so similar in their relations, so identical in their objects, and so perfect in the adaptation of each subordinate part, to the harmony and perfection of the whole, that we cannot but recognise throughout them all the workings of one and the same eternal principle of wisdom and intelligence, presiding from first to last over the total fabric of creation.'-pp. 184-186.

Nor is it the skeleton merely of these sea-lizards that is preserved to us. Dr. Buckland's discovery of their petrified fæces

has

has enabled him to determine the nature of their food, to ascertain the structure of their intestines, and to show even the shape of the minute vessels, and the folds of the mucous membrane with which these were lined.

The facts elicited from the coprolitic remains of the ichthyosauri afford, indeed, a new and curious contribution to the evidences of Natural Theology. They prove the existence of beneficial arrangements and compensations even in those perishable yet important parts which formed the organs of digestion of the extinct inhabitants of our planet. And thus from the meanest substances, strangely preserved through countless ages in the mud into which they were originally voided, the geologist extracts a new, beautiful and striking testimony to the unity, wisdom, and goodness of the creative intelligence! There is something in minutiæ of this homely character, which creates a yet more vivid impression of the reality of these strange monsters of the ancient world even than their petrified skeletons.

When we see the body of an ichthyosaurus, still containing the -~ food it had eaten just before its death, and its ribs still surrounding the remains of fishes, that were swallowed ten thousand, or more than ten times ten thousand years ago, all these vast intervals seem annihilated, time altogether disappears, and we are almost brought into as immediate contact with events of immeasurably distant periods, as with the affairs of yesterday.'-pp. 201, 202.

The plesiosauri next claim our attention; and, if the ichthyosaurus be considered extraordinary, we know not what term to apply to the plesiosaurus; an animal, whose structure, as Cuvier observes, is the most heteroclite, and its character altogether the most monstrous, of any that have yet been found amid the ruins of a former world. A lizard's head with crocodile teeth set on a serpent-like or rather swan-like neck of great length (the vertebræ being about thirty-three), a trunk and tail with the proportions of those of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a cameleon, and the paddles of a whale :

'Such are the strange combinations of form and structure in the plesiosaurus; a genus, the remains of which, after interment for thousands of years amidst the wreck of millions of extinct inhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recalled to light, and submitted to our examination, in nearly as perfect a state as the bones of species that are now existing upon the earth.

cea.

'The plesiosauri appear to have lived in shallow seas and estuaries, and to have breathed air like the ichthyosauri, and our modern cetaWe are already acquainted with five or six species, some of which attained a prodigious size and length; but our present observations will be chiefly limited to that which is the best known, and perhaps

VOL. LVI. NO. CXI.

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