wisdom and design, that ans unfolded by the researches of Geology; and supplies a new link to that important chain, which connects the lost races that formerly inhabited our planet, with a species that are actually living and moving around ourselves.[1] The systematic recurrence, in animals of, such distant eras, of the same contrivances, similarly disposed to effect similar purposes, with analogous adaptations to peculiar conditions of existence, shows that they all originated in the same Intelligence.
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 year; 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.
SECTION VI.
PLESIOSAURUS.[2]
We come next to consider a genus of extinct animals, nearly allied in structure to the Ichthyosaurus, and co-extensive with it through the middle ages of our terrestrial history. The discovery of this genus forms one of the most important additions that Geology has made to comparative
- ↑ Le temps qui répand de la dignité sur tout ce qui échappe à son pouvoir destructeur, fait voir ici un exemple singulier de son influence: ces substances si viles dans leur origine, etant rendues a la lumiére après tant de siécles, deviennent d'une grande importance puis qu'elles servent a remplir un nouveau chapitre dans l'histoire naturelle du globe.—Bulletin Soc. Imp. de Moscow, No. VI. 1833, p. 23.
- ↑ See Pl. 16, 17, 18, 19.
