insects in their flight, captured and bore them down; its lakes and rivers abounded in crocodiles and fresh-water tortoises of ancient type and fashion; and its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian fauna of what has been well termed “fearfully great lizards”--some of which, such as the iguanodon, rivaled the largest elephant in height, and greatly more than rivaled him in length and bulk. Judging from what remains, it seems not improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic period were quite as numerous individually, and consisted of wellnigh as many genera and species as all the mammals of the present time. In the cretaceous ages, the class, though still the dominant one, is visibly reduced in its standing: it had reached its culminating point in the Oolite and then began to decline; and with the first dawn of the Tertiary division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate place in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its times of humiliation and decay that one of the most remarkable of its orders appears--an order itself illustrative of extreme degradation, and which figures largely in every scheme of mythology that borrowed through traditional channels from Divine revelation, as a meet representative of man’s great enemy, the Evil One. I, of course, refer to the ophidian or serpent family. The earliest ophidian remains known to the palæontologist occur in that ancient deposit of the Tertiary division known as the London Clay, and must have belonged to serpents, some of them allied to the Pythons, some to the sea-snakes, which, judging from the corresponding parts of recent species, must have been from fourteen to twenty feet in length.