 great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and
cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the
reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils
of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in
what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto
discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known
species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general
respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.
    Detached broken fossils of pre-Adamite whales, fragments of their bones and
skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at
the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in
the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of
such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the
Rue Dauphiné in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of
the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp,
in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some
utterly unknown leviathanic species.
    But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete
vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation
of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity
took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared
it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some
specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English anatomist,
it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed
species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in
this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape
of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in
his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in
substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the
globe have blotted out of existence.
    When I stand among these mighty leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws,
ribs, and vertebræ, all characterised by partial resemblances to the existing
breeds of sea-
