The rocky layer from which building-materials are derived in these parts covers, with its mighty shell, the greater portion of the neighbouring upland. Here the quarry-man has dug for none knows how many centuries, since the time when Agrippa hewed cyclopean flags to form the stages and façade of the Orange theatre. And here, daily, the pick-axe uncovers curious fossils. The most remarkable of these are teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone, bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction! The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon. The shark of to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant. Other Squali abound in the same stone, all fierce gullets. It contains Oxyrhinæ (Oxyrhina Xiphodon, Agass.), with teeth shaped like pointed cleavers; Hemipristes (Hemipristis Serra, Agass.), whose jaws are furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiæ (Lamia Denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with flexuous, steeled daggers, flattened on one side, convex on the other; Notidani (Notidanus Primigenius, Agass.), whose sunk teeth are crowned with radiate indentations. This dental arsenal, the eloquent witness of the old butcheries, can hold its own with the Crocodile of Nîmes, the Diana of Marseilles, the Horse of Vaison. With its panoply of carnage, it tells me how extermination came at all times to lop off the surplus of life; it says: “On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a shiver of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with truculent devourers and peaceable victims. A long gulf occupied the future site of the Rhône Valley. Its billows broke at no great distance from your dwelling.” Here, in fact, are the cliffs of the bank, in such a state of preservation that, on concentrating my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of the waves. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, Petricolæ, Pholaidids have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one’s fist, round cells, cabins with a narrow conduit-pipe through which the recluse received the incoming water, constantly renewed and laden with nourishment. Sometimes, the erstwhile occupant is there, mineralized, intact to the tiniest details of his striæ and scales, a frail ornament; more often, he has disappeared, dissolved, and his house has filled with a fine sea mud, hardened into a chalky kernel.