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CONCLUSION

        ". . . Of one departed world
" I see the mighty shadow."

    "The revolution and the wrath of Time"

    Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri filled up the measure of their years long ere Eden was planted and the dominion of the man made of the " red earth" acknowledged, over " fish of the sea, fowl of the air, and cattle, and over all the earth and upon every creeping thing."
    Theirs was the pre-Adamite-the just emerged from chaos-planet, through periods known only to God-Almighty: theirs an eltrich-world uninhabitate, sunless and moonless, and seared in the angry light of supernal fire;-theirs a fierce anark thing scorched to a horrible shadow: and they were the horrible chimeras-inexplicable and wonderful incarnations of the myriad generations of the after times- which denned that dreadful earth-alone. The sometime terran, sometime oceanic pterodactyles-those more than vampire monsters, which had solitary occupation of the wastes of sand when black night fell down upon them-were an after-thought: they followed at the heels of the former, and when they did come to scare Solitude at the sound of wing and the fish of the sea 'twas the herding together of furies that hunted in a leash.
    How did they gloat over the million million Medusæ-the boneless zoophites of an element wide as the world, and all their own: innumerable swarmed they, like Milton's cloud of locust angels, and the sauri amongst them as Satan, Molock and Abaddon.
    But the adamantine grapples of Time came upon them: he watched the last struggle of the last horrible persons of their frightful race and fore-went, in consideration of the future lord of the creation of which they were the primal carnivora, the execution of the bond that all the living are bound by- " dust to dust."
    We have explored the sepulchres of these wondrous tribes; behold! the last mummian shroud yields, and we find the heads, bodies, tails and uncouth extremities of a thousand dissimilar creatures, conjoined together as though Nature were but of apprentice-hand when she ordained the genera-the confused and undreamed of families.
    Over these vestiges of Ichthyos and Plesion-sauri-the fleshless bones of the primitive race of preying monsters; over the wide jaws that first committed murder in obedience to the stern laws of Necessity-we love to dwell. Such countless hosts of associations are connected with these gone-by things-so much of the sublime and mystic, of the eternal and inspiring that we invoke fate to continue them ours for ever:-they are sensations-operations-that concentrate infinity and identifies it, a something that the human understanding can grasp bodily and be satisfied therewith, like the opium-eater, and his drug, for awhile.

    FINIS