e rare by which land quadrupeds are swept by
rivers far out into the open sea, and still rarer the contingency of
such a floating body not being devoured by sharks or other predaceous
fish, such as were those of which we find the teeth preserved in some of
the carboniferous strata. But if the carcass should escape, and should
happen to sink where sediment was in the act of accumulating, and if the
numerous causes of subsequent disintegration should not efface all
traces of the body, included for countless ages in solid rock, is it not
contrary to all calculation of chances that we should hit upon the exact
spot--that mere point in the bed of an ancient ocean, where the precious
relic was entombed? Can we expect for a moment, when we have only
succeeded, amidst several thousand fragments of corals and shells, in
finding a few bones of _aquatic_ or _amphibious_ animals, that we should
meet with a single skeleton of an inhabitant of the land?

Clarence, in his dream, saw, "in the slimy bottom of the deep,"

----a thousand fearful wrecks;
A thousand men, that fishes gnaw'd upon:
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl.

Had he also beheld, amid "the dead bones that lay scattered by," the
carcasses of lions, deer, and the other wild tenants of the forest and
the plain, the fiction would have been deemed unworthy of the genius of
Shakspeare. So daring a disregard of probability and violation of
analogy would have been condemned as unpardonable, even where the poet
was painting those incongruous images which present themselves to a
disturbed imagination during the visions of the night.

Until lately it was supposed that the old red sandstone, or Devonian
rocks, contained no vertebrate remains except those of fish, but in 1850
the footprints of a chelonian, and in 1851 the skeleton of a reptile,
allied both to the batrachians and lizards, were found in a sandstone of
that age near Elgin in Scotland.[212] Up to the year 1844 it was laid
down as a received dogma in many works of high authority in geology,
that reptiles were not created until after the close of the
carboniferous epoch. In the course of that year, however, Hermann Von
Meyer announced the discovery, in the coal measures of Rhenish Bavaria,
of a reptile, called by him Apateon, related to the salamanders; and in
1847 three species of another genus, called archegosaurus by Goldfuss,
were obtained from the coal of Saarbruck, between Treves and Stras