The casualties must always be rare by which land quadrupeds are swept by rivers far out into the open sea, and still rarer the contingency of such a floating body not being devoured by sharks or other predaceous fish, such as were those of which we find the teeth preserved in some of the carboniferous strata. But if the carcass should escape, and should happen to sink where sediment was in the act of accumulating, and if the numerous causes of subsequent disintegration should not efface all traces of the body, included for countless ages in solid rock, is it not contrary to all calculation of chances that we should hit upon the exact spot--that mere point in the bed of an ancient ocean, where the precious relic was entombed? Can we expect for a moment, when we have only succeeded, amidst several thousand fragments of corals and shells, in finding a few bones of _aquatic_ or _amphibious_ animals, that we should meet with a single skeleton of an inhabitant of the land? Clarence, in his dream, saw, "in the slimy bottom of the deep," ----a thousand fearful wrecks; A thousand men, that fishes gnaw'd upon: Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl. Had he also beheld, amid "the dead bones that lay scattered by," the carcasses of lions, deer, and the other wild tenants of the forest and the plain, the fiction would have been deemed unworthy of the genius of Shakspeare. So daring a disregard of probability and violation of analogy would have been condemned as unpardonable, even where the poet was painting those incongruous images which present themselves to a disturbed imagination during the visions of the night.