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and confirmed by the fossils before us, as shall be seen. The specimen
marked 'Captain Kidd' was examined in detail. Upon its head and part of
its face was a sort of fur like that upon the tail of a horse. With
great labor its loose skin was removed, whereupon its body was discovered
to be of a polished white texture, thoroughly petrified. The straw it
had eaten, so many ages gone by, was still in its body, undigested--and
even in its legs.
"
Surrounding these fossils were objects that would mean nothing to the
ignorant, but to the eye of science they were a revelation. They laid
bare the secrets of dead ages. These musty Memorials told us when Man
lived, and what were his habits. For here, side by side with Man, were
the evidences that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, the
companion of the other low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten
time. Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here
was the skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the
prodigious elk. Here, also, were the charred bones of some of these
extinct animals and of the young of Man's own species, split lengthwise,
showing that to his taste the marrow was a toothsome luxury. It was
plain that Man had robbed those bones of their contents, since no
toothmark of any beast was upon them--albeit the Tumble-Bug intruded the
remark that 'no beast could mark a bone with its teeth, anyway.' Here
were proofs that Man had vague, groveling notions of art; for this fact
was conveyed by certain things marked with the untranslatable words,
'FLINT HATCHETS, KNIVES, ARROW-HEADS, AND BONE ORNAMENTS OF
PRIMEVAL
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