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Monsters of the Ancient World
It URING the distinct classes of the animal kingdom. year 1814, Sir The teeth of the Lizard-fish, in some in- Everard Home stances amounting to two hundred and published an ten, and the length of the jaws to more account of than six feet, qualified it for preying upon some large and weaker creations; and the half-digested very remark- remains of fishes and reptiles, found able bones within the skeletons, indicate the precise found in a nature of its food. A single paddle of the rock, thirty or four with which the animal was furnished forty feet above the sea sometimes contains more than a hundred level, on the English bones, giving it great elasticity and power, coast. The remains and enabling it to proceed at a rapid rate examined were incom- through the water. The eye was enorplete, and the nature mously large, its cavity, in one species, and habits of the animal to which they being fourteen inches in its longest direcbelonged baffled all inquiry, until the dis- tion. The eye also had a peculiar concovery of more perfect skeletons unfolded struction, to make it operate both like a a race of water reptiles, which received telescope and a microscope, so that the the name of Ichthyosaurus, or Fish- animal could descry its prey by night as lizard. This strange creature, ranging well as day, and at great depths in the from twenty to more than thirty feet in water. This fish-like lizard in some degree length, of which ten species are enume- answers to the words of Milton: rated, had the snout of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, teeth of a crocodile, the vertebræ of a fish, and the paddles of a whale; thus presenting in itself a combination of mechanical contrivances which are now found distributed among three With head uplift above the waves, and eyes That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides, Prone on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood.
The Lizard-fish was an air-breathing cold-blooded and carnivorous inhabitant of the ocean, probably haunting prin- keeping the multiplication of the species cipally its creeks and bays, fitted by its of other animals within proper limits. Though essentially marine, and admirably adapted by its organization to cut the waves, certain peculi. arities of structure have induced the opinion that the forward paddles might be subservient to locomotion, not only in the water but on land. Professor Owen thinks that the Ichthyosauri, like the existing crocodiles, may have come ashore to sleep, or resorted thither to deposit their eggs. The remains of these animals occur in great abundance on the English coast, where the cliffs appear to be inexhaustible quarries of them.
In the same strata in which the remains of the Ichthyosaurus are found, another marine reptile appears, which received its name of Plesiosaurus, signifying akin to the lizard, from its more closely resembling animals of this
