twice, as
if in the act of biting, and in this way made me understand his meaning.

"Teeth!" cried I, with stupefaction, as I examined the bar of iron with
more attention.

Yes. There can be no doubt about the matter. The indentations on the bar
of iron are the marks of teeth! What jaws must the owner of such molars
be possessed of! Have well then, come upon a monster of unknown species,
which still exists within the vast waste of waters--a monster more
voracious than a shark, more terrible and bulky than the whale? I am
unable to withdraw my eyes from the bar of iron, actually half crushed!

Is, then, my dream about to come true--a dread and terrible reality?

All day my thoughts were bent upon these speculations, and my
imagination scarcely regained a degree of calmness and power of
reflection until after a sleep of many hours.

This day, as on other Sundays, we observed as a day of rest and pious
meditation.

Monday, August 17th. I have been trying to realize from memory the
particular instincts of those antediluvian animals of the secondary
period, which succeeding to the mollusca, to the crustacea, and to the
fish, preceded the appearance of the race of mammifers. The generation
of reptiles then reigned supreme upon the earth. These hideous monsters
ruled everything in the seas of the secondary period, which formed the
strata of which the Jura mountains are composed. Nature had endowed them
with perfect organization. What a gigantic structure was theirs; what
vast and prodigious strength they possessed!

The existing saurians, which include all such reptiles as lizards,
crocodiles, and alligators, even the largest and most formidable of
their class, are but feeble imitations of their mighty sires, the
animals of ages long ago. If there were giants in the days of old, there
were also gigantic animals.

I shuddered as I evolved from my mind the idea and recollection of these
awful monsters. No eye of man had seen them in the flesh. They took
their walks abroad upon the face of the earth thousands of ages before
man came into existence, and their fossil bones, discovered in the
limestone, have allowed us to reconstruct them anatomically, and thus to
get some faint idea of their colossal formation.

I recollect once seeing in the great Museum of Hamburg the skeleton of
one of these wonderful saurians. It measured no less than thirty feet
from the nose to the tail. Am I, then, an inhabitant of the earth of t