a brown
and faded character. The leaves were wholly devoid of verdure, and the
flowers, so numerous during the Tertiary period which gave them birth,
were without color and without perfume, something like paper discolored
by long exposure to the atmosphere.

My uncle ventured beneath the gigantic groves. I followed him, though
not without a certain amount of apprehension. Since nature had shown
herself capable of producing such stupendous vegetable supplies, why
might we not meet with mammals just as large, and therefore dangerous?

I particularly remarked, in the clearings left by trees that had fallen
and been partially consumed by time, many leguminous (beanlike) shrubs,
such as the maple and other eatable trees, dear to ruminating animals.
Then there appeared confounded together and intermixed, the trees of
such varied lands, specimens of the vegetation of every part of the
globe; there was the oak near the palm tree, the Australian eucalyptus,
an interesting class of the order Myrtaceae--leaning against the tall
Norwegian pine, the poplar of the north, mixing its branches with those
of the New Zealand kauris. It was enough to drive the most ingenious
classifier of the upper regions out of his mind, and to upset all his
received ideas about botany.

Suddenly I stopped short and restrained my uncle.

The extreme diffuseness of the light enabled me to see the smallest
objects in the distant copses. I thought I saw--no, I really did see
with my own eyes--immense, gigantic animals moving about under the
mighty trees. Yes, they were truly gigantic animals, a whole herd of
mastodons, not fossils, but living, and exactly like those discovered in
1801, on the marshy banks of the great Ohio, in North America.

Yes, I could see these enormous elephants, whose trunks were tearing
down large boughs, and working in and out the trees like a legion of
serpents. I could hear the sounds of the mighty tusks uprooting huge
trees!

The boughs crackled, and the whole masses of leaves and green branches
went down the capacious throats of these terrible monsters!

That wondrous dream, when I saw the antehistorical times revivified,
when the Tertiary and Quaternary periods passed before me, was now
realized!

And there we were alone, far down in the bowels of the earth, at the
mercy of its ferocious inhabitants!

My uncle paused, full of wonder and astonishment.

"Come!" he said at last, when his first surprise was over, "Come