his case the whole of the forest country, where the
diplodocus lay, was submerged beneath the sea, and sank to a depth of
several leagues; for, in the course of countless ages, sea-ooze, to a
depth of at least three miles, was deposited over the forest,
preserving the trunks and even the very sprays of the tropical
vegetation. Who would suppose that the secret history of this great
beast would ever be revealed, as it lay century after century beneath
the sea-floor? But another convulsion took place, and a huge ridge of
country, forming the rocky backbone of North and South America, was
thrust up again by a volcanic convulsion, so that the diplodocus now
lay a mile above the sea, with a vast pile of downs over his head which
became a huge range of snow mountains. Then the rain and the sun began
their work; and the whole of the immense bed of uplifted ocean-silt,
now become chalk, was carried eastward by mighty rivers, forming the
whole continent of North America, between these mountains and the
eastern sea. At last the tropic forest was revealed again, a wide
tract of petrified tree-trunks and fossil wood. And then out of an
excavation, made where one of the last patches of the chalk still lay
in a rift of the hills, where the old river-pool had been into which
the great beast had sunk, was dug the neck-bone of the creature.
Curiosity was aroused by the sight of this fragment of an unknown
animal, and bit by bit the great bones came to light; some portions
were missing, but further search revealed the remains of three other
specimens of the great lizard, and a complete skeleton was put together.

The mind positively reels before the story that is here revealed; we,
who are feebly accustomed to regard the course of recorded history as
the crucial and critical period of the life of the world, must be
sobered by the reflection that the whole of the known history of the
human race is not the thousandth, not the ten-thousandth part of the
history of the planet. What does this vast and incredible panorama
mean to us? What is it all about? This ghastly force at work, dealing
with life and death on so incredible a scale, and yet guarding its
secret so close? The diplodocus, I imagine, seldom indulged in
reveries as to how it came to be there; it awoke to life; its business
was to crawl about in the hot gloom, to eat, and drink, and sleep, to
propagate its kind; and not the least amazing part of the history is
that at le