n in his "Wisdom of the Ancients."
"Jupiter and the other gods," says the philosopher, in his simple
version of the tradition, "conferred upon men a most acceptable and
desirable boon,--the gift of perpetual youth. But men, foolishly
overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon an ass, who, in
returning back with it, being extremely thirsty, and coming to a
fountain, the serpent who was guardian thereof would not suffer him to
drink but upon condition of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it
should be. The silly ass complied; and thus the perpetual renewal of
youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the race of
serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth should pass from men to
serpents," continues Bacon, "seems added, by way of ornament and
illustration, to the fable." And it certainly _has_ much the appearance
of an after-thought. But how very striking the resemblance, borne by the
story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page of human
history which exhibits the first parents of the race as yielding up to
the temptation of the serpent the gift of immortality; and further, how
remarkable the fact, that the reptile selected as typical here of the
great fallen spirit that kept not his first estate, should be at once
the reptile of latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by
philosophical naturalists as representative of a reversed process in the
course of being,--of a downward, sinking career, from the vertebrate
antetype towards greatly lower types in the invertebrate divisions! The
fallen spirit is represented in revelation by what we are now taught to
recognize in science as a _degraded_ reptile.

[Illustration: Fig. 67.

BIRD TRACKS OF THE CONNECTICUT.

(_Lias or Oolite._)]

[Illustration: Fig. 68.

FOSSIL FOOTPRINT.

Connecticut.]

Birds make their first appearance in a Red Sandstone deposit of the
United States in the valley of the Connecticut, which was at one time
supposed to belong to the Triassic System, but which is now held to be
at least not older than the times of the Lias. No fragments of the
skeletons of birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the
Chalk: the Connecticut remains are those of footprints exclusively; and
yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far as it extends, with
remarkable precision and distinctness. They were apparently all of the
Grallae or stilt order of birds,--an order to which the cranes, herons,
and