In this quiet inlet, some eddy has collected and drowned at the bottom of the mire, now turned into marl, enormous heaps of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up oysters a cubit long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could shovel up, in the immense pile, Scallops, Cones, Cytheridæ, Mactridæ, Murices, Turritellidæ, Mitridæ and others too numerous, too innumerable to mention. You stand stupefied before the vital ardour of the days of old, which was able to supply such a pile of relics in a mere nook of earth. The necropolis of shells tells us, besides, that time, that patient renewer of the order of things, has mown down not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays, the neighbouring sea, the Mediterranean, has almost nothing identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of similarity between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the tropical seas. The climate, therefore, has become colder; the sun is slowly becoming extinguished; the species are dying out. Thus speak the numismatics of the stones on my window-ledge. Without leaving my field of observation, so modest, so limited and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and, this time, on the subject of the insect. The country round Apt abounds in a strange rock that breaks off in thin plates, similar to sheets of whitish cardboard. It burns with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell; and it was deposited at the bottom of great lakes haunted by crocodiles and giant tortoises. Those lakes no human eye has ever seen. Their basins have been replaced by the ridges of the hills; their muds, peacefully deposited in thin courses, have become mighty banks of rock. Let us break off a slab and subdivide it into sheets with the point of a knife, a work as easy as separating the superposed layers of a piece of paste- or mill-board. In so doing, we are examining a volume taken from the library of the mountains, we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to the Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams; nay, better: realities converted into pictures. On this page are fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Back-bones, fins, vertebral links, bones of the head, crystal of the eye turned to a black globule, everything is there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel an inclination to scratch off a bit with our finger and taste this supramillenary preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum. There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the deficiency. It says to us: