is now possessed by the Pteropus Pselaphon, or Vampire Bat of the island of Bonin. (See Zool. Journ. No. 16, p. 458.) "Thus, like Milton's fiend, all qualified for all services and all elements, the creature was a fit companion for the kindred reptiles that swarmed in the seas, or crawled on the shores of a turbulent planet.
'The Fiend,
O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies,'
Paradise Lost, Book II. line 947.
With flocks of such-like creatures flying in the air, and
shoals of no less monstrous Ichthyosauri, and Plesiosauri
swarming in the ocean, and gigantic Crocodiles, and Tortoises
crawling on the shores of the primeval lakes and
rivers, air, sea, and land must have been strangely tenanted
in these early periods of our infant world."[1]
As the most obvious feature of these fossil reptiles is the presence of organs of flight, it is natural to look for the peculiarities of the Bird or Bat, in the structure of their component bones. All attempts, however, to identify them with Birds are stopped at once by the fact of their having teeth in the beak, resembling those of reptiles: the form of a single bone, the os quadratum, enabled Cuvier to pronounce at once that the creature was a Lizard: but a Lizard possessing wings exists not in the present creation, and is to be found only among the Dragons of romance and heraldry;[2] while a moment's comparison of the head
- ↑ Geol. Trans. Lond. N. S. Vol. III. part. 1.
- ↑ One diminutive living species of Lizard, (the Draco volans, see Pl. 22, L.) differs from all other Saurians, in having an appearance of imperfect wings, produced by a membranous expansion of the skin over the false ribs which project almost horizontally from the back; the membrane expanded by these false ribs, acts like a parachute to support the animal in leaping from tree to tree, but has no power to beat the
