invariable, indeed, is the plan upon which organized beings are constructed, and so accurately had Cuvier studied the principles of osteology, that from a single bone he could infer the species and general form of the animal to which it belonged, and this notwithstanding he had to investigate forms which specifically differed from all living models. About fifty species of quadrupeds which have ceased to exist upon the earth, and others, such as the opossum, belonging to an order of animals now confined to America and Australia, ten extinct species of birds, and a great variety of fishes and reptiles, have been exhumed from this ancient cemetery; and it is observable that the land animals found in greatest abundance, belong to tribes which inhabit alluvial plains and marshes, and the banks of rivers and lakes. About four-fifths of these animals belong to the order pachydermata, or thick-skinned, from pachus thick, and derma hide. The palæotherium* being the most abundant of these, and its remains being common to other supracretaceous formations, I have sketched its supposed outline from Cuvier's delineation, as a specimen of the animal creation at this early period, which subsequent revolutions "blotted from the book of life."

The palæotherium appears to have been something

* Palæotherium, or ancient wild beast, from palaios, ancient, and therion, wild beast.

between the horse and the tapir, with the small stupid eye of the hog. Seven species have been described by Cuvier. It has been found in the Isle of Wight, and in many more recent formations, but never in the caves or in diluvial gravel. It is one of those species that had ceased to exist before the appearance of man upon the earth. The animal remains are not more strange than those of the vegetable kingdom associated with them, for these all belong to species peculiar to tropical climates.

During the accumulation of this deposit, a great extent of dry land must have existed in the neighbourhood, but this was destined to be again overwhelmed, the sea suddenly resumed its dominion, reoccupied the place of the fresh-water lake or river, and left beneath its waters a mass of micaceous sand, (4 in the diagram) eighty feet in thickness, filled exclusively with the peculiar remains of the shelly tribe of animals which at this period inhabited the ocean. Again, for the last time, the briny element retreated, a lake took possession of its vacated bed, in which the animals and plants living upon its banks were submerged; its shallow waters were gradually dried up, and its marshy bed (5) now forms the summit of many of the vine-clad

*

* The prevalence of a species of plant called by botanists chara, or water-loving plants, in this formation, has been with great probability suggested, as indicating that the water which at this period succeeded the ocean, existed in the state of marshy or shallow lakes, such as now overspread the flat lands in the delta of a large river, or a lake which has been partially silted up; as these plants are always found in such situations; and the animal remains also are such as coincide with this supposition.

hills of that fertile country, where, apparently secure from a renewal of the "war of elements," in which myriads of individuals and whole races of animals have been annihilated, man now pursues the peaceful occupations of industry, interrupted only by the revolutions of society, the convulsions of passion, and the contentions of party, the destructive and frightful operations of which this eventful region has also been the theatre.

The same succession of events which produced the series of rocks we have been examining, in France, occurred perhaps at the same geological period in this country, where, however, the mineralogical character and thickness of the masses is so distinct as almost to defy recognition. It is their position in isolated basins formed in the chalk, and the similarity of fossil organic contents, which prove their identity. No remains of mammalia are found in the London clay, (although in the corresponding formation in the Isle of Wight they have lately been observed), but skeletons of amphibious reptiles have been discovered, and in a detached portion of this bed, the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames, plants, fruit of the cocoa-nut species, and spices of tropical climates exist in great profusion.

Great commotions and convulsions appear to have affected the surface of this part of the earth, soon after the deposition of the tertiary beds, which have upheaved or

* Tertiary is the term usually applied by geologists to the supracretaceous formations, but there seems so much impropriety in the use of a term which expresses neither the age nor the position in the series of this important group of rocks, that I have ventured, for the reasons before stated, to adopt, generally, the more approved term, supracretaceous.

depressed them in common with the lower rocks; thus, the now insulated basins of London and the Isle of Wight appear to have been originally continuous, but have been separated by the elevation of the intervening chalk hills, from which the upper formations have been subsequently washed away by the violent agency which scooped out our valleys: and the occurrence of the lower members of this series capping the older summits of hills in the west and other parts of England, precisely as they are found in the country intervening between London and the Isle of Wight, seems to indicate that they originally extended far beyond their present circumscribed limits. The general inference from all the facts connected with the supracretaceous rocks, is, that Europe at the period of their formation was partially covered with extensive lakes, into which the sea made occasional inroads, and from alterations in the surface effected by internal commotions, which were then frequent, was repeatedly admitted and excluded, while rivers emptying their waters into these great reservoirs, aided in accumulating the debris of land animals and plants. Some of these lakes continued to exist until a very late period in geological history, and the outlets by which they were drained and laid dry still remain: as for instance, at the mountain gorge of the Fort l'Ecluse, through which the Rhone now escapes from Switzerland; and the narrow pass of the Rhine at Bingen, previous to the forcing of which the waters of these Alpine rivers overspread a large expanse of country, in the superficial strata of which evident traces of their long and tranquil sojournment may be observed.

As we failed to identify the remains of the human

species with the caverned bones and relics buried in the diluvial and other beds, which belong to the most recent of geological periods, their entire absence in the solid strata will create no surprise. But when all the phenomena of fossil remains, whether dispersed on the surface or imbedded in rocks, were referred to the deluge, naturalists experienced great disappointment at not finding the bones of man associated with those of the animals which they regarded as his contemporaries: it was an anomaly which, prolific as was their age in theory, they were utterly unable to explain. Judge then of the satisfaction with which the announcement of Scheuchzer, of the discovery of a human skeleton imbedded in the limestone of Eningen, was hailed by these enthusiastic theorists. Their hypothesis was no longer questionable, scepticism must hide its diminished head before this " preuve indubitable." Scheuchzer described it in a learned dissertation in the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1726, entitled "Homo diluvii testis," or the man who witnessed

the deluge, accompanied by an engraving on wood on the natural scale; (the sketch in the margin is, however, copied from Cuvier's drawing.) And again, in a subsequent work, the "Physique Sacrée," he introduces the portrait and description, and assures us "that it is indubitable-and that it contains the moiety of the

*

*The rock of Eningen in which these remains were found, is a lacustrine formation of recent date, highly prolific in organic