o another supposed extinct family--the
Dipterides (a genus of fish, furnished with two fins only, whence the
name), though my uncle could not class it exactly. All, without
exception, however, were blind. This unexpected capture enabled us to
renew our stock of provisions in a very satisfactory way.

We were now convinced that this subterranean sea contained only fish
known to us as fossil specimens--and fish and reptiles alike were all
the more perfect the farther back they dated their origin.

We began to hope that we should find some of those saurians which
science has succeeded in reconstructing from bits of bone or cartilage.

I took up the telescope and carefully examined the horizon--looked over
the whole sea; it was utterly and entirely deserted. Doubtless we were
still too near the coast.

After an examination of the ocean, I looked upward, towards the strange
and mysterious sky. Why should not one of the birds reconstructed by the
immortal Cuvier flap his stupendous wings aloft in the dull strata of
subterranean air? It would, of course, find quite sufficient food from
the fish in the sea. I gazed for some time upon the void above. It was
as silent and as deserted as the shores we had but lately left.

Nevertheless, though I could neither see nor discover anything, my
imagination carried me away into wild hypotheses. I was in a kind of
waking dream. I thought I saw on the surface of the water those enormous
antediluvian turtles as big as floating islands. Upon those dull and
somber shores passed a spectral row of the mammifers of early days, the
great Liptotherium found in the cavernous hollow of the Brazilian hills,
the Mesicotherium, a native of the glacial regions of Siberia.

Farther on, the pachydermatous Lophrodon, that gigantic tapir, which
concealed itself behind rocks, ready to do battle for its prey with the
Anoplotherium, a singular animal partaking of the nature of the
rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel.

There was the giant Mastodon, twisting and turning his horrid trunk,
with which he crushed the rocks of the shore to powder, while the
Megatherium--his back raised like a cat in a passion, his enormous claws
stretched out, dug into the earth for food, at the same time that he
awoke the sonorous echoes of the whole place with his terrible roar.

Higher up still, the first monkey ever seen on the face of the globe
clambered, gamboling and playing up the granite hills. Still