1. The first genus to be noticed is termed the Ichthyosaurus, which partakes at once of the characters of crocodiles, lizards, and fishes. So lavish has nature been in providing for the accommodation and wants of this anomalous creature, that to the paddles of a whale, is added the sternum of an _ornithorhynchus_; the head of a lizard is joined to the vertebræ of a fish; and the snout of a porpoise is combined with the jaws and teeth of a crocodile. The magnitude of the eye is prodigious, and the jaws, sometimes exceeding six feet in length, are studded with an apparatus of teeth, amounting in some instances, to a hundred and eighty. “From the quantity of light admitted in consequence of the prodigious size of the eye,” says Dr. Buckland, “it must have possessed very great powers of vision: we have also evidence that it had both microscopic and telescopic properties. We find on the front of the orbital cavity, in which this eye was lodged,”—a cavity sometimes fourteen inches in diameter,—“a circular series of petrified thin bony plates, ranged round a central aperture, where once was placed the pupil; the form and thickness of each of these plates very much resembles that of the scales of the artichoke. It also tends to associate the animal in which it existed, with the family of lizards, and exclude it from that of fishes.” These bony plates gave strength to the surface of the eye-ball, which required protection above and below, from the dashing of the waves when it reared its head to the storm, and from the pressure of deep water when it scoured the bottom. The nostrils, it would seem, were placed so close to the anterior angle of the eye, as to render it impossible to breathe without raising the organs of sight to the surface of the water. An ocean, peopled with such monsters! Imagine so many eyes, larger than a man’s head studding its surface, and illuminating, as with fire-balls, their terrific jaws, glaring out from the briny flood; and what a scene to gaze upon, so different from all that now covers these rich alluvial plains! [Illustration: Plesiosaurus.]