n, or rather the immense
and stupendous reservoir, would have been completely filled in a short
space of time. Perhaps even this water, having to contend against the
accumulated subterraneous fires of the interior of the earth, had become
partially vaporized. Hence the explanation of those heavy clouds
suspended over our heads, and the superabundant display of that
electricity which occasioned such terrible storms in this deep and
cavernous sea.

This lucid explanation of the phenomena we had witnessed appeared to me
quite satisfactory. However great and mighty the marvels of nature may
seem to us, they are always to be explained by physical reasons.
Everything is subordinate to some great law of nature.

It now appeared clear that we were walking upon a kind of sedimentary
soil, formed like all the soils of that period, so frequent on the
surface of the globe, by the subsidence of the waters. The Professor,
who was now in his element, carefully examined every rocky fissure. Let
him only find an opening and it directly became important to him to
examine its depth.

For a whole mile we followed the windings of the Central Sea, when
suddenly an important change took place in the aspect of the soil. It
seemed to have been rudely cast up, convulsionized, as it were, by a
violent upheaving of the lower strata. In many places, hollows here and
hillocks there attested great dislocations at some other period of the
terrestrial mass.

We advanced with great difficulty over the broken masses of granite
mixed with flint, quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a large field,
more even than a field, a plain of bones, appeared suddenly before our
eyes! It looked like an immense cemetery, where generation after
generation had mingled their mortal dust.

Lofty barrows of early remains rose at intervals. They undulated away to
the limits of the distant horizon and were lost in a thick and brown
fog.

On that spot, some three square miles in extent, was accumulated the
whole history of animal life--scarcely one creature upon the
comparatively modern soil of the upper and inhabited world had not there
existed.

Nevertheless, we were drawn forward by an all-absorbing and impatient
curiosity. Our feet crushed with a dry and crackling sound the remains
of those prehistoric fossils, for which the museums of great cities
quarrel, even when they obtain only rare and curious morsels. A thousand
such naturalists as Cuvier would not have su