them at leisure.  The Zooelogical Museum at Cambridge is indebted to the generosity of Mr. Joshua Bates for a very fine set of casts taken from the Megatherium in the British Museum.  They are now mounted, and may be seen in one of the exhibition-rooms of the building.  Large Reptiles, but very unlike those of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs, belonging chiefly to the types of Turtles, Crocodiles, Pythons, and Salamanders, existed during the Tertiary epochs.  The wood-cut below represents a gigantic Salamander of the Tertiary deposits.  It is a curious fact, illustrative of the ignorance of all anatomical science in those days, that, when the remains of this reptile (Audrias, as it is now called) were first discovered toward the close of the seventeenth century, they were described by old Professor Scheuchzer as the bones of an infant destroyed by the Deluge, and were actually preserved, not for their scientific value, but as precious relics of the Flood, and described in a separate pamphlet, entitled, “Homo Diluvii Testis.”  Among the Tertiary Reptiles the Turtles seem to have been a very prominent type, by their size as well as by their extensive distribution.  Their remains have been found both in the far West and in the East.  The fossil Turtles of Nebraska are well known to American naturalists; but the Oriental one exceeds them in size, and is, indeed, the most gigantic representative of the order known thus far.  A man could stand under the arch of the shield of the old Himalayan Turtle preserved in the British Museum.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

It would carry me too far, were I to attempt to give anything more than the most cursory sketch of the animals of the Tertiary age; and, indeed, they are so well known, and have been so fully represented in text-books, that I fear some of my readers may think even now that I have dwelt too long upon them.  Monkeys were unquestionably introduced upon earth before the close of the Tertiaries; some bones have been found in Southern France, and also on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, in the later Tertiary deposits; but these remains have not yet been collected in sufficient number to establish much more than the fact of their presence in the animal creation at that time.  I do not offer any opinion respecting the fossil human bones so much discussed recently, because the evidence is at present too scanty to admit of any decisive judgment concerning them.  It becomes, however, daily more probable that facts will force us sooner or later to admit that the creation of man lies far beyond any period yet assigned to it, and that a succession of human races, as of animals, have followed one another upon the earth.  It may be the inestimable privilege of our young naturalists to solve this great problem, but the older men of our generation must be content to renounce this hope; we may have some prophetic vision of its fulfilment, we may look from afar into the land of promise, but we shall not enter in and possess it.