Demonstration of the truth of the Christian religion.. (1844) (14782629612)

Identifier: demonstrationoft00keit (find matches)
Title: Demonstration of the truth of the Christian religion..
Year: 1844 (1840s)
Authors: Keith, Alexander. (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: (n. p.)
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress



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ich are now dispersedthrough various classes and orders of existing animals, butare no longer united in the same genus. Thus, in the sameindividual, the snout of a tortoise is combined with the teethof a crocodile, the head of a lizard with the vertebrae of afish, and the sternum of an ornithorhynchus with the paddlesof a whale. Some of the largest of these reptiles must haveexceeded thirty feet in length.* The plesiosaurus (nearly a lizard) is nearly allied instructure to the ichthyosaurus, and coextensive with itthrough the middle ages of our terrestrial history. To thehead of a lizard it united the teeth of a crocodile, a neck ofenormous length, resembling the body of a serpent, a trunkand tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped,the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a ivhale. Such arethe strange combinations of form and structure in the plesio-saurus, a genus the remains of which, after interment for * Auckland, ibid., p. 169, OP THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES. 141
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Prom Sir Charles Bells Bridgwater Treatise on the Hand. (Conybeare.) thousands of years amid the wreck of millions of extinctinhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recalled tolight by the researches of the geologist, and submitted to ourexamination in nearly as perfect a state as the bones of thespecies that are now existing upon the earth. The plesio-sauri appear to have lived in shallow seas and estuaries. Weare already acquainted with five or six species, some of whichattained a prodigious size and length &c* The megalosaurus, or great lizard, which ranks in the sameorder and era, was an enormous reptile measuring from fortyto fifty feet in length, and, according to Cuvier and Buckland, partaking of the structure of the crocodile and the monitor.!It probaMy fed on smaller reptiles, such as crocodiles andtortoises, whose remains abound in the same strata with itsbones.J Identified as the same word of the original He-brew is with the dragon or crocodile of the Nile, a cl