The middle great period of the geologist--that of the Secondary division--possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two exceptional instances its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age,--the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later, were its huge creeping things,--its enormous monsters of the deep,--and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful _whales_, not, however, as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class,--ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs,--must have tempested the deep; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and iguanodon,--creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,--must have crowded the plains or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the footprints of at least one of its many birds are fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on to deal was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find rendered, in the margin, great sea monsters.