Again, the work of the Fifth Day is thus described in the Sacred Narrative:--“God also said: Let the waters bring forth the creeping creature having life, and the fowl that may fly over the earth under the firmament of Heaven. And God created the great whales, and every living and moving creature which the waters brought forth, according to their kinds, and every winged fowl according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”[171] And in this case, as in the former, we may find the counterpart of the Bible story in the records of Geology. “The secondary age of the geologist,” says the eminent writer from whom we have already quoted, “possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belong. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and, in some one or two exceptional instances, its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age,--the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later,--were its huge creeping things,--its enormous monsters of the deep,--and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful _whales_, not however as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class--ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs--must have tempested the deep; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teleosaurus megalosaurus, and iguanodon,--creatures some of which more than rival the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,--must have crowded the plains, or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the foot-prints of, at least, one of its many birds, are fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size.”[172]