Thus I have endeavoured to draw a picture, vague and imperfect, I know, of some of the more remarkable and prominent features of the primeval earth, limiting the sketch to those forms which we know only by their fossil remains. In endeavouring to paint their contour and general appearance, and still more their habits and instincts, conjecture must be largely at work--a conjecture, however, which takes for its basis the anatomical exigencies of the osseous structure, and the analogy of existing creatures the most nearly related to the fossil. These forms, many of them so huge and uncouth, are well known as having tenanted various regions of the earth during what is known as the Tertiary Era, in its later periods. They certainly do not exist in those regions now. When did their life--their species-life--terminate? I have been assuming that they were upon the earth, as living sentient beings, in the earliest age of what we call the historic period--that is, according to the chronology of the Word of God, which must be true, within the last six thousand years. This assumption is so heterodox, that unsupported by evidence, it would be generally rejected; let us then inquire what evidence there is that man was an inhabitant of the globe contemporaneously with these huge giants of the bestial creation. I do not pretend to offer positive evidence concerning the synchronism of _all_ the animals I have been describing with man; but, as there is no doubt that they were all contemporaneous, _inter se_, if we can attain to good grounds for concluding his co-existence with _some_ of them, it may be no unfair presumption that the case was so with the others. And first, with respect to the _Colossochelys Atlas_, that vast fossil land tortoise of the Sewalik hills, in the north of India, whose carapace may have covered an area of twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, and whose entire length, as in walking, when head and tail were protruded, could not have been much less than thirty feet. The discoverers of this interesting relic, Dr Falconer and Major Cauntley, have discussed the question of its probable cessation of existence with some care; and they have come to the conclusion "that there are fair grounds for entertaining the belief, as probable, that the _Colossochelys Atlas_ may have lived down to an early period of the human epoch, and become extinct since." This they infer on two grounds: first, from the fact that, in the same strata, which are not limited to the Sewalik hills, but extend, with the remains of this immense tortoise, all over the great Indian area, from Ava to the Gulf of Cambay, other tortoises, crocodiles, &c., which were contemporary with the _Colossochelys_, have survived to the present time; and, secondly, from mythologic and cosmogonic traditions of many eastern nations, having reference to a tortoise of such gigantic size as to be associated in the current fables with an elephant.[7]