in this room is very striking; the central space being fully occupied
by the cast of the wonderful megatherium of the Pampas, and the
skeleton of the North American mastodon. The megatherium is described
zoologically as having combined the characteristics of the armadillo,
sloth, and ant-eater. In height it averaged eight feet; its feet were
a yard in length; and its claws were of terrible strength; it was
encased in an impenetrable scaly armour; and it lived upon roots. The
mastodon was of the elephant kind. But the gigantic tapir described by
Baron Cuvier, or the dinotherium, supposed by the Baron to have
reached the extraordinary height of eighteen feet, of which only
partial remains have been found, and are here deposited, is the
largest fossil mammalia yet discovered. It is said to have had the
habits of the walrus. The southern wall cases of the room contain a
fine collection of the fossil remains of elephants and mastodons,
chiefly from the Sewalik Hills of northern India. The third case (c)
is filled with Brazilian fossils of varieties of the megatherium,
monkeys, &c. On the right of the entrance from the fifth room are some
fossil mammalia from Montmartre arranged by Cuvier. Having wandered
about amid these suggestive wrecks of the remote past, the visitor
should approach the central upright case placed against the western
wall of this noble room. Here is a fossil of part of a human skeleton,
the possession of which our geologists owe to the fortune of war--it
having been found on board a French ship captured by an English
cruiser. As the visitor will perceive, the skull is wanting, but this
important part is said to lie in an American museum. However, the
spine, the thigh bones, and the ribs are distinctly visible. This
precious relic was extracted, with other human fossils, from the
cliffs of Guadaloupe, about forty years ago. It is the skeleton of a
savage slaughtered about one hundred and fifty years ago, and buried
in the spot where it was found. As yet, the period when man first
appeared upon the face of the earth is not told in geology. No fossil
human remains have been found even in the ancient tertiary strata. The
story of human life is revealed in other records, if not in the
sepulchral strata of the earth's crust. In this very Museum, which the
visitor now treads--in these cases of fossil bones which in themselves
are common material enough, the lordly intellect that has traced their
deep significance, proves that, of all animal types, man is the
highest and the strongest--removed from the most powerful mammoth and
megatherium--the bones of which he has re-fixed, that they may, as
stones, tell the story of their wonderful characters when alive. A
curious resurrection this, by Cuvier and others, of long ages ago, to
be pondered well. Not a holiday matter, to be stared at--an hour's
wonder--and then forgotten, as of no value in the markets of the
living world; but a great and a serious science, with more romances in
it than shelves of novels. To know something of the early state of the
world which we enjoy--to have some evidences given to us that before
human animals began to play their part here, wonderful monsters, part
mammalia, part birds, part reptiles, gambolled upon the scene; that
wingless birds stalked upon marshy grounds; that strange and ghastly
lizards crawled upon our fruitful Kent; and gigantic fish floated in
our tranquil waters, but no beautiful humming birds, majestic lions,
and graceful horses--only crawling and swimming life, everywhere
preying, and the early sea-weed rising in the sea because the polypus
wanted its food: to think of these things is to have some knowledge.
In these dim regions of the past, what glimpses are there of the great
eternal laws, the natural progresses, the continual upward tendency of
all things! And then, taking this revealed book of the past in his
hand, how a man may sit and ponder on all that is to be--dream of
times when some future geological hammer will be rapping at the clay
about the stone relics of his bones, and a man will gaze upon his
hardened anatomy with a mild and holy joy--when all that breathes and
moves to-day will be entombed in ancient strata of the earth, and busy
life will be carried on a hundred feet above the ruins of the present.
These thoughts dwell happily with good men.
Hence, proceeding on his way, the visitor returns east from the sixth
room into the fifth, and turns thence south, into the passage which
leads into the western gallery of the Museum, and immediately into