Land, Sea, and Air Dominated by Reptiles By Sir W. Boyd Dawkins, The history of life on the earth, revealed by the fossils in the rocks, shows that the animals appear in due order according to their organization. The simplest—the infinite variety of sponges, corals,; Molluses, ete., constituting the invertebrates—appear in the oldest rocks, and the rest follow—the fishes, the new tribe (amphibia), the reptiles, the birds, the lower mammals (metatheria), and the higher mammals (eutheria) that have been the masters of the earth from the beginning of the tertiary period down to the present day. Man is the last im the long process sion through "the corridors of time."
The age of reptiles is a period in the ancient history of the earth infinitely remote as compared with the first appearance of man. It represents a stage in the evolution of life when. reptiles were the dominant inhabitants of the earth and occupied the place now held by the mammatia in the economy of nature. They were masters of the lund, of the sea, and even of the air, Britain 1N THE Repriian Ace.
During the reptilian age Britain was on the southern margin of a great continent, ranging from the highlands of Scotland to the north and west into the Atlantic, and towards Sweden and Norway and indefinitely towards the Pole, The hills of the Lake District, of Wales, Devon, and Cornwall were islands, and probably also the Pennines and the Mendips. The continent and the islands were covered with forests, mostly of conifers, cycads, and zamia, with an undergrowth of ferns.
On this great continent and its islands there were reptiles great and small, some with naked scaly skins, and others covered with an armour of bony plates and pointed horns. Some were of existing rep-lilian types, such as crocodiles and gavials, while others (dinosaurs) are extinct. The latter, possessed of characters no longer found in the living reptiles, in size rivalled, if rot surpassed, the largest elephants and giraffes. Like the mammalia, they consisted of eaters of plants and eaters of flesh. Among the former in Britain we may note the iguanodon: of the Weald of Kent, a giant reptile living in the forests. measuring 16-ft. high, with teeth specially adapted for feeding on Plants, and with a build and gait like a kangaroo. There is also the still larger cetiosaurus, 10}-ft. high and 60-ft. long, of the colitic strata of Oxford and Peterborough, which probably haunted the marshes, rivers, and, like the diplomocus of America, heavy-footed and walking on all fours. These creatures took the place in their world long afterwards occupied by the ele-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.