"Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Rejudge his justice, be the god of God."
Be it enough for the geologist rightly to interpret the record of creation—to declare the truth as he finds it—to demonstrate, from evidence no clear intellect ever yet resisted, that he, the Creator, from whom even the young lions seek their food, and who giveth to all the beasts, great and small, their meat in due season, ever wrought as he now works in his animal kingdom—that he gave to the primeval fishes their spines and their stings—to the primeval reptiles their trenchant teeth and their strong armor of bone—to the primeval mammals their great tusks and their sharp claws—that he of old divided all his creatures, as now, into animals of prey and the animals preyed upon—that from the beginning of things he inseparably established among his non-responsible existences the twin laws of generation and of death—nay, further, passing from the established truths of Geologic to one of the best established truths of Theologic science—God's eternal justice and truth—let us assert, that in the Divine government the matter of fact always determines the question of right, and that whatever has been done by him who rendereth no account to man of his matters, he had in all ages, and in all places, an unchallengeable right to do.
The oldest known reptiles appear just a little before the close of the Old Red Sandstone, just as the oldest known fishes appeared just a little before the close of the Silurian System. What seems to be the Upper Old Red of our own country, though there still hangs a shade of doubt on the subject, has furnished the remains of a small reptile, equally akin, it would appear, to the lizards and the batrachians; and what seems to be the Upper Old Red of the United States has exhibited the foot-tracks of a larger animal of the same class, which not a little resemble those which would be impressed on recent sand or clay by the alligator of the Mississippi, did not the alligator of the Mississippi efface its own footprints (a consequence of the shortness of its legs) by the trail of its abdomen. In the Coal Measures, the reptiles hitherto found—and it is still little more than ten years since the first was detected—are all allied, though not without a cross of the higher crocodilian or lacertian nature, to the batrachian order—that lowest order of the reptiles to which the frogs, newts, and salamanders belong. These reptiles of the carboniferous era, though only a few twelvemonths ago we little suspected the fact, seem to have been not very rare in our own neighborhood. My attention was called some time since by Mr. Henry Cadell—an intelligent practical geologist—to certain appearances in one of the Duke of Buccleuch's coal pits near Dalkeith, which lie regarded as the tracks of air-breathing quadrupeds; and, after examining a specimen, containing four footprints, which he had brought above ground, and which not a little excited my curiosity, we visited the pit together. And there, in a side working about half a mile from the pit mouth, and about four hundred feet under the surface, I found the roof of the coal, which rose at a high angle, traversed by so many foot-tracks, upwards, downwards, and athwart, that it cost me some little care to trace the individual lines. At least one of the number, however—consisting of eleven footprints of the right and as many of the left foot—I was able to trace from side to side of the working, a distance of four yards; and several of the others for shorter spaces. The prints, which were reverses or casts in a very coarse sandstone, were about thirtecn inches apart across the creature's chest, and rather more than a foot apart from its fore to its hinder limbs. They were alternately larger and smaller—the smaller (those of the fore feet) measuring about four inches in length, and the larger (those of the hinder feet) about six inches. The number of toes seemed to be alternately four and five; but from the circumstance that the original matrix on which the tracks had been impressed—a micaceous clay resolved into a loose fissile sandstone—had fallen away in the working of the pit, leaving but the boldly-relieved though ill-defined casts on the coarse sandstone, I could not definitely determine the point. Enough, however, remained to show that at that spot—little more than a mile from where the Duke of Buccleuch's palace now stands—large reptiles had congregated in considerable numbers shortly after the great eight feet coal seam of the Dalkeith basin had been formed. In another part of the pit I found foot-tracks of apparently the same animal in equal abundance, but still less distinct in their state of keeping. But they bore testimony with the others to the comparative abundance of reptilian life at an early period, when the coal-bearing strata of the empire were little more than half deposited. It was not, however, until the Permian and Triassic Systems had come to a close, and even the earlier ages of the Oolitic System had passed away, that the class received its fullest development in creation. And certainly very wonderful was the development which it then did receive. Reptiles became everywhere the lords and masters of this lower world. When any class of the air-breathing vertebrates is very largely developed, we find it taking possession of all the three old terrestrial elements—earth, air, and water. The human period, for instance, like that which immediately preceded it, is peculiarly a period of mammals; and we find the class, free, if I may so express myself, of the three elements, disputing possession of the sea with the fishes, in its Cetaceans, its seals, and its sea-lions, and of the air with the birds, in its numerous genera of the bat family. Further, not until the great mammaliferous period is fairly ushered in do either the bats or the whales make their appearance in creation. Remains of Oolitic reptiles have been mistaken in more than one instance for those of Cetacea; but it is now generally held that the earliest known specimens of the family belong to the Tertiary ages, while those of the oldest bats occur in the Eocene of the Paris Basin, associated with the bones of dolphins, lamantines, and morses. Now, in the times of the Oolite it was the reptilian class that possessed itself of all the elements. Its gigantic enaliosaurs, huge reptilian whales mounted on paddles, were the tyrants of the ocean, and must have reigned supreme over the already reduced class of fishes; its pterodactyles—dragons as strange as were ever feigned by romancer of the middle ages, and that to the jaws and teeth of the crocodile added the wings of a bat and the body and tail of an ordinary mammal, had "the power of the air," and, pursuing the fleetest insects in their flight, captured and bore them down;[14] its lakes and rivers abounded in crocodiles and fresh water tortoises of ancient type and fashion; and its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian fauna, of what has been well termed "fearfully great lizards,"—some of which, such as the iguanodon, rivalled the largest elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in length and bulk. Judging from what remains, it seems not improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic period were quite as numerous individually, and consisted of well nigh as many genera and species, as all the mammals of the present time. In the cretaceous ages, the class, though still the dominant one, is visibly reduced in its standing; it had reached its culminating point in the Oolite, and then began to decline; and with the first dawn of the Tertiary division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate place in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its times of humiliation and decay that one of the most remarkable of its orders appears—an order itself illustrative of extreme degradation, and which figures largely, in every scheme of mythology that borrowed through traditional channels from Divine revelation, as a meet representative of man's great enemy the Evil One. I of course refer to the ophidian or serpent family. The earliest ophidian remains known to the Palæontologist occur in that ancient deposit of the Tertiary division known as the London Clay, and must have belonged to serpents, some of them allied to the Pythons, some to the sea-snakes, which, judging from the corresponding parts of recent species, must have been from fourteen to twenty feet in length.
Fig. 61.
Fig. 62
Fig. 63.
Fig. 64.