of the National Museum, they would be greatly
more imposing still did they more adequately represent the gigantic
flora of the remote age to which they belong.

[Illustration: Fig. 91.

CALAMITES CANNAEFORMIS.]

Passing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of the Palaeozoic
division to the animals of the Secondary one, the attention is at once
arrested by the monstrous forms on the wall. Shapes that more than rival
in strangeness the great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of
mediaeval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, hydras, and
chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the passing visitor; and,
though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only
the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye
ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in
the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that
half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out
from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with
tails somewhat resembling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged
dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, had careered
through the air on leathern wings like those of a bat; there an enormous
crocodilian whale, that, mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed,
in quest of prey, the green depths of the sea; yonder a herbivorous
lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting from its
snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank meadows of the Wealden,
must have stood about twelve feet high. All is enormous, monstrous,
vast, amid the creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of
this division of the gallery.

[Illustration: Fig. 92.

MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI.]

We pass on into the third and lower division, and an entirely different
class of existences now catch the eye. The huge mastodon, with his
enormous length of body, and his tusks projecting from both upper and
under jaw, stands erect in the middle of the floor,--a giant skeleton.
We see beside him the great bones of the megatherium,--thigh bones
eleven inches in diameter, and claw-armed toes more than two feet in
length. There, too, ranged species beyond species, are the extinct
elephants; and there the ponderous skull of the dinotherium, with the
bent tusks in its lower jaw, that give to it the appearance of a great
pickaxe, and that must have dug deeply of old amid the l