half deposited. It was not, however, until the Permian and Triassic Systems had come to a close, and even the earlier ages of the Oolitic System had passed away, that the class received its fullest development in creation. And certainly very wonderful was the development which it then did receive. Reptiles became everywhere the lords and masters of this lower world. When any class of the air-breathing vertebrates is very largely developed, we find it taking possession of all the three old terrestrial elements—earth, air, and water. The human period, for instance, like that which immediately preceded it, is peculiarly a period of mammals; and we find the class, free, if I may so express myself, of the three elements, disputing possession of the sea with the fishes, in its Cetaceans, its seals, and its sea-lions, and of the air with the birds, in its numerous genera of the bat family. Further, not until the great mammaliferous period is fairly ushered in do either the bats or the whales make their appearance in creation. Remains of Oolitic reptiles have been mistaken in more than one instance for those of Cetacea; but it is now generally held that the earliest known specimens of the family belong to the Tertiary ages, while those of the oldest bats occur in the Eocene of the Paris Basin, associated with the bones of dolphins, lamantines, and morses. Now, in the times of the Oolite it was the reptilian class that possessed itself of all the elements. Its gigantic enaliosaurs, huge reptilian whales mounted on paddles, were the tyrants of the ocean, and must have reigned supreme over the already reduced class of fishes; its pterodactyles—dragons as strange as were ever feigned by romancer of the middle ages, and that to the jaws and teeth of the crocodile added the wings of a bat and the body and tail of an ordinary mammal, had "the power of the air," and, pursuing the fleetest insects in their flight, captured and bore them down;[14] its lakes and rivers abounded in crocodiles and fresh water tortoises of ancient type and fashion; and its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian fauna, of what has been well termed "fearfully great lizards,"—some of which, such as the iguanodon, rivalled the largest elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in length and bulk. Judging from what remains, it seems not improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic period were quite as numerous individually, and consisted of well nigh as many genera and species, as all the mammals of the present time. In the cretaceous ages, the class, though still the dominant one, is visibly reduced in its standing; it had reached its culminating point in the Oolite, and then began to decline; and with the first dawn of the Tertiary division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate place in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its times of humiliation and decay that one of the most remarkable of its orders appears—an order itself illustrative of extreme degradation, and which figures largely, in every scheme of mythology that borrowed through traditional channels from Divine revelation, as a meet representative of man's great enemy the Evil One. I of course refer to the ophidian or serpent family. The earliest ophidian remains known to the Palæontologist occur in that ancient deposit of the Tertiary division known as the London Clay, and must have belonged to serpents, some of them allied to the Pythons, some to the sea-snakes, which, judging from the corresponding parts of recent species, must have been from fourteen to twenty feet in length.
Fig. 61.
Fig. 62
Fig. 63.
Fig. 64.
Fig. 65.
Fig. 66.
And here let us again pause for a moment, to remark how strangely these irascible, repulsive reptiles—creatures lengthened out far beyond the proportions of the other members of their class by mere vegetative repetitions of the vertebræ—condemned to derive, worm-like, their ability of progressive motion from the ring-like scutes of the abdomen—venomous in many of their species—formidable in others to even the noblest animals, from their fascinating powers and their great craft—without, fore or hinder limbs, without thoracic or pelvic arches—the very types and exemplars (our highest naturalists being the judges) of the extreme of animal degradation—let us, I say, remark how strangely their history has been mixed up with that of man and of religion in all the older mythologies, and in that Divine Revelation whence the older mythologies were derived. It was one of the most ancient of the Phœnician fables, that the great antagonist of the gods was a gigantic serpent, that had at one time been their subject, but revolted against them and became their enemy. It was a monstrous serpent that assailed and strove to destroy the mother of Apollo ere yet the birth of the god, but which, long after, Apollo in turn assaulted and slew. It was a great serpent that watched over the apples of the Hesperides, and that Hercules, ere he could possess himself of the fruit, had to combat and kill. It was a frightful serpent that guarded the golden fleece from Jason, and which the hero had to destroy in the first instance, and next to exterminate the strange brood of armed men that sprang up from its sown teeth. In short, the old mythologies are well nigh as full of the serpent as those ancient Runic obelisks of our country, whose endless knots and complicated fretwork are formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, however, accept as representative of this innumerable class of legends, the classical story, rendered yet more classical by the profound and reverend comment given by Bacon in his "Wisdom of the Ancients." "Jupiter and the other gods," says the philosopher, in his simple version of the tradition, "conferred upon men a most acceptable and desirable boon—the gift of perpetual youth. But men, foolishly overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon an ass, who, in returning back with it, being extremely thirsty, and coming to a fountain, the serpent who was guardian thereof would not suffer him to drink but upon condition of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it should be. The silly ass complied; and thus the perpetual renewal of youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the race of serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth should pass from men to serpents," continues Bacon, "seems added, by way of ornament and illustration, to the fable." And it certainly has much the appearance of an after-thought. But how very striking the resemblance, borne by the story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page of human history which exhibits the first parents of the race as yielding up to the temptation of the serpent the gift of immortality; and further, how remarkable the fact, that the reptile selected as typical here of the great fallen spirit that kept not his first estate, should be at once the reptile of latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by philosophical naturalists as representative of a reversed process in the course of being—of a downward, sinking career, from the vertebrate antetype towards greatly lower types in the invertebrate divisions! The fallen spirit is represented in revelation by what we are now taught to recognize in science as a degraded reptile.
Fig. 67.
Fig. 68.
Birds make their first appearance in a Red Sandstone deposit of the United States in the valley of the Connecticut, which was at one time supposed to belong to the Triassic System, but which is now held to be at least not older than the times of the Lias. No fragments of the skeletons of birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the Chalk: the Connecticut remains are those of footprints exclusively; and yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far as it extends, with remarkable precision and distinctness. They were apparently all
