Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/162

 158 anatomy. It is of the Plesiosaurus, that Cuvier asserts the structure to have been the most heteroclite, and its characters altogether the most monstrous, that have been yet found amid the ruins of a former world. To the head of a Lizard, it united the teeth of a Crocodile; a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent: a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale. Such are the strange combinations of form and structure in the Plesiosaurus—a genus, the remains of which, after interment for thousands of years amidst the wreck of millions of extinct inhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recalled to light by the researches of the Geologist, and submitted to our examination, in nearly as perfect a state as the bones of species that are now existing upon the earth.

The Plesiosauri appear to have lived in shallow seas and estuaries, and to have breathed air like the Ichthyosauri, and our modern Cetacea. We are already acquainted with five or six species, some of which attained a prodigious size and length; but our present observations will be chiefly limited to that which is the best known, and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, viz. the P. Dolichodeirus.