Page:The college beautiful, and other poems.djvu/37

Rh I blushed to hear the Ganoid wail; He sobbed, "I'm not a stoic, And I 've lost my vertebrated tail In the early Mesozoic" But I scoffed and longed for a Teliost, With the most intense of wishes; For my sympathies had all been lost On those queer Devonian fishes. The Belemnite and the Polyp weird Exceedingly did act ill, And from the Lepidodendron jeered The bitter Pterodactyl. I sought to rest on the marshy shore, Where the Labyrinthodonts amble, But I heard the hoarse Batrachian roar 'Neath a cryptogamic bramble. Yet the sedimentary fear I name And my igneous indignation, By a metamorphic move, became A quite distinct formation. The beast I saw was shy and small, No elephant or camel, 'T was only a marsupial, But oh ! it was a mammal!