--but these are matters of course:--we are only thinking of such
as have passed away and left no descendants to perpetuate their forms to
our own times.

Away to the great Austral land--in our day minished to the insular
Australia and New Zealand and a few satellite isles--but then, in the
morning of creation, possibly stretching far to the north and on either
hand, so as to include the scattered groups of Polynesia in one great
continent, and even to reach so far as Madagascar on the west. This was
the region of gigantic fowls, and of marsupial quadrupeds. Kangaroos of
eight or nine feet in stature leaped over the primeval bush, and wombats
and dasyures of elephantine bulk burrowed in the hill sides, and great
lion-like beasts prowled about the plains. But surely the most
characteristic feature of the scene was impressed by the birds! Vast
struthious birds, which would have looked down with supreme contempt on
the loftiest African ostrich, whose limb-bones greatly exceeded in bulk
those of our dray horses, whose three-toed feet made a print in the clay
some eighteen inches long, and whose proud heads commanded the horizon
from an elevation of twelve feet above the ground,--terrible birds,
whose main development of might was in the legs and feet, being utterly
destitute of the least trace of wings--these strode swiftly about the
rank ferny brakes, possessing a conscious power of defence in the back
stroke of their muscular feet, and fearless of man or beast, mainly
nocturnal in their activity, concealing themselves by day in the
recesses of the dense forests, where the majestic trees were interwoven
with cable-like climbers, or couching in the midst of tall reeds and
aroideous plants that margined the great swampy lakes of these regions.

But what of our own land? What of these distant isles of the Gentiles in
that early day, when the enterprising sons of Cain, migrating from the
already straitened land of Nod, were pushing their advancing columns,
with arts and arms, in all directions over the young earth? Did any of
them reach to the as yet insular Europe, settling themselves along the
margins of its deep gulfs and draining basins? Perhaps they did, and
even explored the utmost limits of the great Atlantic island, on the
remains of which we live. What did they find here? A land of mountain
and valley, of plain and down, of lake and river, of bog and fell, of
forest and field, in some features much as now: where the oa