sailed and strove to destroy the mother of Apollo ere yet the birth of the god, but which, long after, Apollo in turn assaulted and slew. It was a great serpent that watched over the apples of the Hesperides, and that Hercules, ere he could possess himself of the fruit, had to combat and kill. It was a frightful serpent that guarded the golden fleece from Jason, and which the hero had to destroy in the first instance, and next to exterminate the strange brood of armed men that sprang up from its sown teeth. In short, the old mythologies are well-nigh as full of the serpent as those ancient Runic obelisks of our country whose endless knots and complicated fret-work are formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, however, accept as representative of this innumerable class of legends, the classical story, rendered yet more classical by the profound and reverend comment given by Bacon in his "Wisdom of the Ancients." 66 Jupiter and the other gods," says the philosopher, in his simple version of the tradition, "conferred upon men a most acceptable and desirable boon, the gift of perpetual youth. But men, foolishly overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon an ass, who, in returning back with it, being extremely thirsty, and coming to a fountain, the serpent who was guardian thereof would not suffer him to drink but upon condition of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it should be. The silly ass complied; and thus the perpetual renewal of youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the race of serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth should pass from men to serpents," continues Bacon, "seems added, by way of ornament and illustration, to the fable." And it certainly has much the appearance of an afterthought. But how very striking the resemblance

borne by the story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page of human history which exhibits the first parents of the race as yielding up to the temptation of the serpent the gift of immortality; and further, how remarkable the fact, that the reptile selected as typical here of the great fallen spirit that kept not his first estate, should be at once the reptile of latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by philosophic naturalists as representative of a reversed process in the course of being,—of a downward, sinking career, from the vertebrate antetype towards greatly lower types in the invertebrate divisions! The fallen spirit is represented in revelation by what we are now taught to recognise in science as a degraded reptile.

Birds make their first appearance in a Red Sandstone deposit of the United States in the valley of the Connecticut, which was at one time supposed to belong to the Triassic System, but which is now held to be at least not older than the times of the Lias. No fragments of the skeletons of birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the Chalk: the Connecticut remains are those of footprints exclusively; and yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far as it extends, with remarkable precision and distinctness. They were apparently all of the Grallæ or stilt order of birds,- -an order to which the cranes, herons, and bustards belong, with the ostriches and cassowaries, and which is characterized by possessing but three toes on each foot (one species of ostrich has but two), or, if a fourth toe be present, so imperfectly is it developed in most of the cases, that it fails to reach the ground. And in almost all the footprints of the primeval birds of the Connecticut there are only three toes exhibited. Peculiar, ill understood laws regulate the phalangal divisions of the various animals. It is a law of the human kind,

for instance, that the thumb should consist of but three phalanges; while the fingers, even the smallest, consist of four. And, in the same way, it is a law generally exemplified among birds, that of the three toes which correspond to the fingers, the inner toe should be composed of three phalanges, the middle or largest toe of four phalanges, and the outer toe, though but second in point of size, of five phalanges. Such is the law now, and such was equally the law, as shown by the American foot-prints, in the times of the Lias. Some of the impressions are of singular distinctness.

Every claw and

phalange has left its mark in the stone; while the trifid termination of the tarso-metatarsal bone leaves three marks more,-fifteen in all,-the true ornithic number. In some of the specimens even the pressure of a metatarsal brush, still possessed by some birds, is distinctly traceable; nay, there are instances in which the impress of the dermoid papillæ has remained as sharply as if made in wax. But the immense size of some of these foot-prints served to militate for a time against belief in their ornithic origin. The impressions that are but secondary in point of size greatly exceed those of the hugest birds which now exist; while those of the largest class equal the prints of the bulkier quadrupeds. There are tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of Connecticut that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer to the inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance apart in the straight line, a stride of about six feet in the creature that impressed them in these ancient sands,-measurements that might well

startle zoologists who had derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing birds exclusively. Comparatively recent discoveries have, however, if not lessened, at least familiarized us to the wonder. In a deposit of New Zealand that dates little if at all in advance of the human period, there have been detected the remains of birds scarce inferior in size to those of America in the Liassic ages. The bones of the Dinornus giganteus, exhibited by the late Dr Mantell in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1850, greatly exceeded in bulk those of the largest horse. A thigh-bone sixteen inches in length measured nearly nine inches in circumference in the middle of the shaft: the head of a tibia measured twentyone inches in circumference. It was estimated that a foot entire in all its parts, which formed an interesting portion of the exhibition, would, when it was furnished with nails, and covered by the integuments, have measured about fifteen inches in length; and it was calculated by a very competent authority, Professor Owen, that of the other bones of the leg to which it belonged, the tibia must have been about two feet nine inches, and the femur about fourteen and a half inches long. The larger thigh-bone referred to must have belonged, it was held, to a bird that stood from eleven to twelve feet high, the extreme height of the great African elephant. Such were the monster birds of a comparatively recent period; and their remains serve to render credible the evidence furnished by the great foot-prints of their remote predecessors of the Lias. The huge feet of the greatest Dinornus whose bones have yet been found would have left impressions scarcely an inch shorter than those of the still huger birds of the Connecticut. Is it not truly wonderful, that in this late age of the world, in which the invention of the poets seems to content itself with humbler and lowlier flights than of old,