covering, and some species show a rugose anterior termination of the snout, suggestive of fleshy lips like those of the bat, and which may have been similarly used to stretch and clean the wing-membrane." [AE] Seeley: "_Ornithosauria._" Here, however, perched on the trees, we see true birds. At least they have beaks, and are clothed with feathers. But they have very strange wings, the feathers all secondaries, without any large quills, and several fingers with claws at the angle of the wing, so that though less useful as wings, they served the double purpose of wing and hand. More strange still, the tail was long and flexible, like that of a lizard, with the feathers arranged in rows along its sides. If the lizards of this strange and uncertain time had wings like bats, the birds had tails and hands like lizards. This was in short the special age of reptiles, when animals of that class usurped the powers which rightfully belonged to creatures yet in their nonage, the true birds and mammals of our modern days, while the birds were compelled to assume some reptilian traits. Yet, strange to say, representatives of the higher creatures destined to inherit the earth at a later date actually existed. Toward the close of the Mesozoic we find birds approaching to those of our own day, and almost at the beginning of the time there were small mammals, remains of which are found both in the earlier and later formations of the Mesozoic, but which never seem to have thriven; at least so far as the introduction of large and important species is concerned. Traversing the Mesozoic woods, we might see here and there little hairy creatures, which would strike a naturalist as allies of the modern bandicoots, kangaroo rats, and myrmecobius of Australia; and closer study would confirm this impression, though showing differences of detail. In their teeth, their size, and general form, and probably in their pouched or marsupial reproduction, these animals were early representatives of the smaller quadrupeds of the Austral continent, creatures which are not only small but of low organisation in their class.