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 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 well adjusted 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.
SECTION III.
FOSSIL SAURIANS.
I n those distant ages that elapsed during the
formation of strata of the secondary series, so
large a field was occupied by reptiles, referrible
to the order of Saurians, that it becomes an important
part of our enquiry to examine the history
and organization of these curious relics of
ancient creations, which are known to us only in
a fossil state. A task like this may appear
quite hopeless to persons unaccustomed to the
investigation of subjects of such remote antiquity;
yet Geology, as now pursued, with the
aid of comparative anatomy, supplies abundant
evidence of the structure and functions of these
extinct families of reptiles; and not only enables
us to infer from the restoration of their skeletons,
what may have been the external form of their
bodies; but instructs us also as to their economy
and habits, the nature of their food, and even of
their organs of digestion. It further shows their
relations to the then existing condition of the
world, and to the other forms of organic life
with which they were associated.
The remains of these reptiles bear a much
greater resemblance to one another, than to those