Passing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of the Palæozoic division to the animals of the Secondary one, the attention is at once arrested by the monstrous forms on the wall. Shapes that more than rival in strangeness the great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of mediæval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the passing visitor; and, though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with tails somewhat resembling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, had careered through the air on leathern wings like those of a bat; there an enormous crocodilian whale, that, mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed, in quest of prey, the green depths of the sea; yonder a herbivorous lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting from its snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank meadows of the Wealden, must have stood about twelve feet high. All is enormous, monstrous, vast, amid the creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of this division of the gallery. [Illustration: Fig. 92. MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI.]