Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/121

Rh yore legions of dolphins and whales were 'blowing' freely, ploughing the surface of the sea with their broad tails, and quietly sporting without fear of man. These fossil remains are of a much higher antiquity than all the products of human industry. Man had not yet made his appearance at the period when the sea covered these latitudes; the earth was then neither sufficiently prepared nor sufficiently solidly established to receive the 'king of creation.' Between the present epoch and that time past when the soil which now bears the wonders of the city of Rubens reposed at the bottom of the sea, we find numerous and incontrovertible vestiges of an intermediate period when many great terrestrial mammifers held their sway.

"From the depths of Siberia to the basin of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, two great pachyderms, the Mammoth and tichorine Rhinoceros, trod in great numbers the shallow waters and plains, at the same time that the great bears so carefully described by Dr. Schmerling (in 1833) frequented the sombre caverns of Liége. The nearly complete skeleton disinterred two years since at Lierre amongst bones of rhinoceros, ox, deer, horse, and hyæna, belongs to this intermediate period. . . . The North Sea had not then its present limits; England had not yet, perhaps, been subjected to that terrible convulsion which violently separated it from the Continent; and judging from the considerable number of bones which are met with in certain places in the present seas, these great pachyderms traversed freely and dry-foot from the Mouse and the Scheldt to the Thames and the county of Essex. . . . As I propose to speak of the fossil bones collected from the sand, otherwise called the 'Crag,' of the environs of Antwerp, and which forms a real catacomb of dolphins and whales, permit me to draw attention to the species which now visit our coasts, in order the better to judge of the differences which are revealed by a comparison between the present North Sea and the Sea of the Crag at that geological epoch. Who is there that, during the fine days of summer, reclining on the sand of the dunes or at the foot of the cliff, abandoned to his reveries, has not been struck with that majestic nature which, under a thousand different forms, spreads waves of life on the sea! Who has not asked himself,—This shore of to-day, is it like the shores of other days? These waters, have they always enclosed in their bosom the same fishes? What mean these petrified bones, these tusks of mammoths which the sea throws up sometimes along the coast? As the archæologist, arrested by the majestic ruins of Thebes or Palmyra, delights in evoking the remembrance of their peoples, and figuring to himself the forum and the temple filled with the dense crowd, so the naturalist sees the ancient seas roil their foaming waves on the dry land, the waters peopled with dolphins and sirens, star-fish and 'ear-shells.'. . . All the species, cetacean or fish, mollusc or polype, buried in those vast beds of sand, have disappeared from our seas, and even their analogues inhabit only much more southern regions.

"The mise en scene is the same as of old: flood and ebb produce the same effects; the surf causes the same ravages,—in a word, the decorations remain, but the actors are changed.

"The phenomena most apparent to the naturalist in comparing the pre-