golden filagree work, meandering amid the pellucid spar that fills the chambers of the shelf.” We pass by some other fossils found in the lias, such as the pentacrinite, of which we shall speak when we come to other members of the crinoideal family, gryphites,[80] of which the _gryphea incurva_ is the most common type, broken portions of which, and sometimes good specimens, may be found in most gravel heaps, their peculiar form having obtained for them the name among the rustics of “_devil’s toe-nails_;” and belemnites,[81] often met with in vast numbers, and known under the name of _ladies’ fingers_, and _thunderbolts_; and fossil fish, a few specimens of which are found in the lias. Passing by these, we next notice the huge Saurians,[82] by far the most wondrous vertebrated animals with which either the ancient or modern vestiges of creation have made us acquainted. These saurians, sometimes called Enaliosaurians, (_enalios_, the sea, and _sauros_, a lizard,) on account of their peculiar habitat, may all be included in Milton’s description of the leviathan, though it is hard to tell what precise creature our great poet had in his “mind’s eye” at the time of writing this description—one line of which, from having a syllable too much, reads most unrhythmically—for the crocodile does not go so far out to sea as he represents, and if he did, would be hardly likely to go on to the “Norway foam;” nor can he mean the whale, for the whale has no “scaly rind:”— “That sea beast, Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.” _Par. Lost_, Book I. But before we enter on a description of these extinct and anomalous creatures, we shall give a sketch of both. No. 1 is the skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus,[83] restored from the fragments found chiefly at Lyme Regis: it may be seen, with several of its congeners and contemporaries, in the British Museum. No. 2 is a restored outline of this saurian; from both of which sketches it will be seen that the most justly dreaded monsters of our tropical climates sink into insignificance beside the ancient tenants of the mighty deep, in those remote periods of geological antiquity we are now contemplating. The combination of the forms of the fish and the lizard seems more like a troubled dream of Fuseli, than the calm and philosophic deductions of the most eminent anatomists and philosophers. [Illustration: Fossil]