When one is about to travel, or to undertake a journey of any distance from the daily beat of home, it is very seldom indeed that he puts into his pocket a book of science. Voyages, travels, a review at most, or the newest novel, may fill up a spare place in the portmanteau: anything that requires study, or would draw upon the reflective faculties, can be no fitting companion for the occasion, with at least nine-tenths of our moving public. If the preceding pages have been perused with any attention at all, it is to be hoped that other things will be considered as worthy of a passing glance, as sure we are they cannot fail to be replete with lessons of instructive wisdom. On the ground of mere ephemeral curiosities by the way, geological matters claim consideration. They are exhaustless, too, and ever varying as you proceed. When you imagine that the last mountain rock or quarry contained the whole catalogue of Natural History, and showed you more than Goldsmith, or Buffon, you find that over the next ridge, or in the neighboring field, there are new subjects for study, and still renewing matters for wonder. If you have taken up your abode for the night at classic Rugby, at sporting Melton-mowbray, or among the academic bowers of Oxford, there are objects all around, in every hill-side, ravine, or railway section, to fill you at once with admiration and astonishment. Go, inquire of that rock. It is the _lias limestone_; beyond it, and at no great distance, lies the _oolite_; and there, in the immediate vicinity of both, you have the _Stonesfield slate_. We invite you to examine any one of these common-place looking stones; and not in Gulliver, not in the history of the Knight of La Mancha, not in all the Mysteries of Udolpho, not in the Romance of the Forest whose harmonious periods so charmed our youth, will you find anything to compare with the marvels therein to be disclosed. The machinery of a tale may require the aid of giants and genii, but here is “truth without fiction,” more startling, marvelous, and so beyond the bounds of nature as now felt and seen, that the most daring fancy is utterly outstripped in its loftiest flights into the regions of the ideal. The series of beds which constitute the mineral features of this extensive district contains the full development of the reptilian type to which we were introduced in the last chapter. Animals there are in these rocks, with forms and features, so fantastic, and apparently disproportioned, that the tales of the most unscrupulous traveler would suffer in comparison. And in truth, there is no page in the book of nature—none, certainly, in all the works of man—so fraught with wonders, or remarkable for stirring incident, as the epoch of animal life whose history is there inscribed.