One of the most beautiful exhibitions of the colour of clear water in various thicknesses which I know, is at the entrance of the Rhone into the Lake of Geneva. The thick pale-coloured brownish-white sediment of the river shoots out for a quarter of a mile or more into the dark blue waters of the deep lake, and on a bright sunny day as it subsides reflects the light upwards from different depths through the clear water. Where it has sunk but little the colour is green, owing to the influence of the yellow mud. Farther on it is ultra-marine blue, and then, where it has sunk deeper, we get full indigo tints. The movement of the water and its churning up by the steamers' paddles add to the variety of effects, since the foam of air-bubbles submerged throws up the light through the water. It is not possible to doubt as one watches the admixture of the river and the lake, and the eddies and hanging walls of sediment, that one is floating over a vast depth of magnificent blue self-coloured fluid which is traversed by the sunlight in ways and degrees varying according to its depth and the volume of the pale mud of the in-rushing Rhone and the abundance of fine air-bubbles "churned" into the water by the paddle-wheels of the steamer.
There is a prevalent notion, encouraged by the fanciful exaggerations of newspaper gossips, that the animals of past ages, whose bones are from time to time dug out of rocks and sand quarries, were many of them much bigger than any at present existing, and that we are living in an age of degeneracy. It is true that the mammoth and the mastodon were enormous creatures, but they were _not_ bigger than their living representatives, the great elephants of Africa and India. The African elephant often stands 11 ft. high at the shoulder, and occasionally attains 12 ft.
Some eighty years ago Dr. Gideon Mantell became celebrated by his discovery of the bones of huge reptiles–far bigger than any existing crocodile or lizard–nearly as big as elephants, in the Wealden rocks of Tilgate Forest in Sussex. He and Sir Richard Owen distinguished several kinds–the Iguanodon, the Megalosaurus, the Hylæosaurus, and others. Models of these creatures as they appeared when clothed in flesh and hide were carefully made, and placed picturesquely among the ponds and islands of the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham when it was first opened to an enchanted public in the fifties. As a small boy I, at that time, fell under their spell.