Transcribe Notice of the Ward cabinets...the University of Rochester (1863)

32 OPNINIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MEN.

whorled shells; many of them, being sawn open and polished, show the curious siphuncle within, and without a surface resembling festoons of foliage and elegant embroidery. Alongside is a full regiment of belemnites with ink-bags for artillery; and stone lilies of enormous size grow out of solid rocks, with skeletons made up (by calculation) of 30,000 separate pieces. How forbidding is even a fancy sketch of that green reptilian period. Imagine a black, slimy plesiosaurus, 20 feet long, half-walking, half-creeping up on one side; and, on the other, a huge labrythinodon making elephantine tracks toward you! Monster birds cast their long shadows over the new red sandstone; while icthyosaurs, with eyes glaring like globes of fire set in a crocodilian head, and paddles like the arms of a windmill, prowl through a wide waste of waters, sole monarchs of the main! Of all this scene of horror, nothing now remains but "footprints on the sands of time." Travelling on, we come to the oolitic series - the burial place of other races, who, in their turn, were the fierce lords of this lower world. There is not a freak of the most distorted imagination which is not surpassed by the "fearfully great lizards" of this era. Here are the horns and scales of the massive iguanodon, a strange animal longer and taller than the largest elephant, having an alligator's snout, a tail 13 feet long, and altogether lifted upon legs that would well compare with the trunks of California trees. When it moved, whole forests were trodden down. Here, too, we find fragments and casts of those gigantic, carnivorous, cold-blooded reptiles, the megalosaur and Teleosaur; and yonder upon the wall, but stuck fast in the rock, is a flying dragon, called pterodactyl, with the head of a crocodile, the wings of a bat, the body of a mammal, five toes, and a tail.

From the oolitic we step to the cretaceous fossils. Here we have a magnificent group of fishes, sharks' teeth, crioceratites, spongesm echinoderms, infusoria, etc., etc. But head over all, in this department, is the famous lizard of the Moselle - the mosasaurus of which Mr. Ward has the only cast in America, and the seventh in the world. High Miller, in his "Cruise of the Betsey," has a pleasant story about the original specimen. Next is the eocene division, which represents the time when the earth began to wear its present landscape. We find here the teeth of the harmless palaeotherium and anoplotherium from the Paris Basin, teeth and head of the royal zeuglodon, fishes from Monte Bolca, turtles from the Isle of