“Do not imagine that the winged messenger was able to transmit only a few words or at most a few lines. It was not with a pen or on ordinary paper that the despatches entrusted to the pigeons were written. By ingenious methods and with unheard-of delicacy it was found possible to obtain characters so fine and sheets of paper so thin that a roll of these sheets weighing scarcely a gram and enclosed in a quill contained as much reading matter as ten printed volumes. What a marvelous piece of work, that package of letters fastened to the pigeon’s tail, that quill transformed into a library in which thousands of persons—friends, kinsfolk, statesmen—communicated their projects, their fears, their hopes! In this manner the mail service was maintained during those woeful times.” CHAPTER LIX SOME PREHISTORIC ANIMALS “Fossil remains of all sorts of animals, from the largest to the smallest, are found embedded in stone. There are lizards which, if alive, would hardly find room enough to turn around in many of our public squares, so monstrous is their size; tortoises with shell as large as a small boat; fishes of strange formation; birds of a singular character such as we no longer behold; and enormous quadrupeds that would dwarf to insignificance our sturdy ox. All flying creatures of the air, all walking and creeping animals of the earth, every form of life swimming in the water, are represented in these fossil remains found in the heart of our rocks, but of a shape and often of a size very different from those of our living animals. “These ancient creatures have never been seen alive by man, so far back in the past is their period. After inhabiting the earth for a very long time, they disappeared forever, to give place to other species. What remains of them consists chiefly of bones, which from their hardness and their mineral character offer the most resistance to the various destructive agencies. With the sole aid of these bones science succeeds in reconstructing the exact form of the animal. It also tells us what the animal fed on and what were its habits. By a miracle of sagacity it resuscitates, so to speak, the ancient, dislocated carcass, and makes it live again to the mind’s eye. “Fossil bones are commonly found embedded in stone quarried at considerable depths; it needs the work of pick and chisel and hammer to free them from the rock. How did they come to be there? In the same way as shells. If the creature lived in the waters of a lake or of the sea, the mud at the bottom covered the body after death. If it lived on land, the floods swept away its carcass and bore it to the river, which in turn carried it to lake or ocean. Later the lake dried up or the ocean receded, and the hardened clay left behind became the stone whence to-day are obtained the relics of prehistoric forms of animal life.