Before man came into the world the woods and waters swarmed with great reptiles. There are none such now-a-days,--reptiles with long legs, reptiles with wide wings! Shall we see what they were like? The great objection to them is that they have such hard names. Among distinguished examples of the “vanished fauna” was the lælaps, which from its relics we conclude to have been a ferocious land-lizard, fierce and huge; but as yet its form and habits have not been fully decided. We know more of the reptile bat, a fellow-citizen of the lælaps, and well-fitted to hold his own in the society of that grim monster, for to ferocity and size it added the accomplishment of flight. Was it then a bird? No; it was more like a bat. The largest pterodactyles found have been discovered in Kansas, and the remains suggest animals perhaps eighteen feet in extent of wing. It is singular that the smaller forms of these creatures had teeth, and the larger ones were toothless. The legs and feet were very weak and had small claws. In our bats the tip of the wings has a claw, sharp and hooked; the pterodactyles seem to have had no claws on the wings. Some think that the bodies of these flying creatures were well covered with scales, but there is no clear evidence of this fact. The upper-arm bone was of moderate length; the forearm, of about the same length, had two bones, and had claws on the first three fingers, and then the fourth finger stretched out to several feet in length and sustained the membrane that formed the wing. The flight must have been jerky and uneven like that of bats. The famous roc, seen by Sinbad the sailor, fades into insignificance before this creature out of Nature’s wonder-book; and the great vulture of the Alps,[27] which carried off lambs and even babies, and is now happily extinct, must have been, compared with the ancient reptile bat, a small and gentle flying thing. Another wonderful family of animals that now-a-days exists only among the rock treasures of the genii were the mosasaurs, whose nature and habits were long subjects of dispute. Specimens of these creatures have been found over eighty feet long, with a skull more than a yard long, and the jaws set with strong, cone-shaped teeth. The trunk of this reptile was ribbed like that of a snake, and it possessed two pairs of webbed feet, or paddles, to guide its course in the water. On land it must have moved with the wave-like motions of a serpent. It was covered with small scales, and was driven through the water by strokes of its mighty tail.