the great agents of nature were silently depositing in the congregating and shifting earths dead images of the prevailing life.  Ages roll on as the reptiles give place to higher animal organisation developed in carnivora, the quickening blood warms, and then as the sovereign of all the grades of life, erect and gifted with reason, comes man.  Something of this vast and half-told progress is shown in the range of fossil cases with which the visitor is engaged.  He has passed the era of reptiles and fishes, and on entering the sixth and last room of the gallery, he will notice the higher series of fossils.  The distribution of the

FOSSIL MAMMALIA

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