While tempest-tost, seek the loved—the lost,

But find them on earth no more!”—Richardson.

Below we add a small group of oolitic shells, not on account of any particular beauty of form attaching to them, but as characteristic of this formation, and as lying conveniently near us for being figured. Their hard names—hard to the mere English reader—may possibly alarm the young, who may at present skip the names: let them get to love the science—let them get into the habit of making nature have a meaning in its realities, and into the settled purpose of determining to know what kind of a world this is in which God has cast their lot, and soon these hard names will be only as finger-posts, directing to certain roads on which they may journey to the end of a happy pilgrimage. Aye, better than any old pilgrimage to a fabulous Holy Sepulchre, will be your pilgrimage to sepulchres wrought by the hand of Infinite Benevolence, for the creatures whom his infinite wisdom had formed, and sustained until he pronounced the decree, “Return!”

1. CUCULLEA CARINATA.
2. CUCULLEA UMBONATA.
3. MODIOLA BIPARTITA.
4. TEREBRATULA GLOBOSA.
5. TEREBRATULA DIGONA.
6. TEREBRATULA MAXILLATA.

Before we quit the Oolite, we have one more stranger to introduce—and in very truth he is the strangest stranger with whom we have yet made acquaintance. We refer to the Pterodactyle.[[97]] The geologist, we may suppose, has just lighted on one of these extraordinary remnants of antiquity, say in the Stonefield Quarry, Oxfordshire, and stands aghast as his pick lays open the fragments of this nondescript creature.

But when the researches of science had laid bare the whole of the fossil remains of this heterogeneous creature, when the head and gape of the crocodile, the wing-hands of the bat, and the web-feet of the duck were all revealed; when it was ascertained to be one of those flying reptiles that have no existing type, and that it was “the most extraordinary of all the beings of whose former existence the study of fossils has made us aware,” and “the most unlike anything that exists in the known world;” the blank wonder of the geologist gave way to calm and admiring study, as these undreamt-of relics of the past were made subservient to the wisdom and delight of the present.

The following is Cuvier’s description of this strange creature, borrowed from Ansted, vol. i, p. 418:—