Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/134

 130 or lash of his tail, could in an instant have demolished the Couguar or the Crocodile? Secure within the panoply of his bony armour, where was the enemy that would dare encounter this Leviathan of the Pampas? or, in what more powerful creature can we find the cause that has effected the extirpation of his race?

His entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, adapted exactly to the work it had to do; strong and ponderous, in proportion as this work was heavy, and calculated to be the vehicle of life and enjoyment to a gigantic race of quadrupeds; which, though they have ceased to be counted among the living inhabitants of our planet, have, in their fossil bones, left behind them imperishable monuments of the consummate skill with which they were constructed. Each limb, and fragment of a limb, forming co-ordinate parts of a well-adjusted and perfect whole; and through all their deviations from the form and proportion of the limbs of other quadrupeds, affording fresh proofs of the infinitely varied, and inexhaustible contrivances of Creative Wisdom.

In those distant ages that elapsed during the formation of strata of the secondary series, so large a field was occupied by reptiles, referable to the order of Saurians, that it becomes an important part of our inquiry to examine the history and organization of these curious relics of ancient creations, which are known to us only in a fossil state. A task like this may appear quite hopeless to persons unaccustomed to the investigation of subjects of such remote antiquity; yet Geology, as now pursued, with the aid of comparative anatomy, supplies abundant evidence of the structure