Other Squali, all ferocious gluttons, abound within the same stone. It contains Oxyrhinæ (O. xyphodon, Agass.), whose jaws are furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiæ (L. denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with sharp, flexuous daggers, flat on one side, convex on the other; and Notidani (N. primigenius, Agass.), whose sunken teeth are crowned with radiating indentations. This dental arsenal, bearing eloquent witness to bygone massacres, can hold its own with the Nîmes Crocodile, the Marseilles Diana or the Vaison Horse. With its panoply of carnage, it tells me how extermination came at all times to prune the excess of life; it says: ‘On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a splinter of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with warlike devourers and peaceful victims. A deep inlet occupied the future site of the Rhone valley. Its billows broke not far from your house.’ Here in fact are the cliffs of the shore, in such a state of preservation that, when I concentrate my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of curving billows. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, [7] Petricolæ, [8] Pholades [9] have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one’s fist; circular cells; cabins with a narrow opening through which the recluse received the incoming water, laden with food and constantly renewed. Sometimes the erstwhile occupant is there, mineralized, intact to the smallest details of his striæ, of his scales, a brittle ornamentation; more often he has disappeared, fallen into decay, and his house has filled with a fine sea-mud, hardened into a chalky kernel. In this quiet inlet, collected by some eddy from the surrounding sea-bed and sunk to the bottom of the oozes, now turned into marl, there are stupendous deposits of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up Oysters eighteen inches long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could scoop up from this enormous heap Scallops, Coni, [10] Cytheres, [11] Mactræ, [12] Murices, [13] Turritellæ, [14] Mitræ [15] and others too numerous, too innumerable, to mention. You stand stupefied before the intense vitality of the days of old, which was able to supply us with such a mass of relics in a mere hole in the ground. This necropolis of shells tells us also that time, that patient renewer of the harmony of things, has mown down not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays the neighbouring sea, the Mediterranean, contains hardly anything identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of resemblance 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 approaching extinction; the species are dying out. Thus I am told by the numismatics of my stone window-sill.