eld 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 Palaeontologist 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.