After he had eaten his supper she went up to bed with him; and when she knelt by his little bed and prayed that her dear boy might have strength to resist temptation, and that he might love God, and try, even, when he was so young, to serve and obey him, Charley felt very sorry for what he had done, and soon sobbed himself to sleep.

In the night he moaned, and was so restless, that his mother got up and went to him. She found him very feverish, and before daylight he was in a high fever; and for several weeks

because she was so anxious about you; and on the pleasant sunshiny days she has been shut up in the house because she would not leave you. So I hope, my dear boy, as God has graciously spared your life, you will remember, when you disobey your parents, you break his law, and cause them very great unhappiness."

Charley thought he should always remember this sickness; aad often afterwards, when he was tempted to do wrong, his mother's pale face would come before him, and he would pray,

he was very ill, and his kind" Lead me not into temptation.' mother watched by him constantly, night and day.

Often, in his disturbed sleep, he murmured of fishes, and thought Hamilton was throwing them upon him.

DURATION OF THE SOUL.

EVERY little boy and girl has a soul,-a soul that must live for ever. When the body lies in the cold grave, the soul will One day he saw how very continue to live, and be more pale his mother was, and he vigorous than it is now. When said " Oh, mother, I am afraid ten thousand years have passed it has made you sick to take away, when all the great care of me." His father, who towns and buildings in England, | was in the room, said "Yes, and the whole world have Charley, many nights your perished, the soul will still live. mother has not slept, and many How needful then to prepare days she could scarcely eat, for the eternal world.

POETRY.

THE TIME FOR PRAYER.

MORN is the time to pray,
Before the cares of day

Steal on the hours;
Just when the saffron hue
Tinges the eastern blue,
Spangling the early dew

On fragrant flowers. Noon is the time to pray, 'Mid busy scenes of day

We need it more.
"Tis then the heavenly Dove
May test our blighted love;
His snowy pinions move,

And from us soar.

Eve is the time to pray,
Just when the tints of day
Die in the west,
When violets sweetly weep,
And weary zephyrs sleep
Upon the weary deep,
In quiet rest.

Fow sweet is closet prayer!
We breathe the balmy air

Of heaven's clime,
Dews from celestial flowers!
And odoriferous bowers,
Fall on us in these hours

Of holy time.

OUR YOUTH'S DEPARTMENT.

ANCIENT ANIMALS FOUND IMBEDDED IN ROCKS.

IN our last number we furnished our young readers with a few introductory remarks on the science of Geology, and now we proceed to describe some of the strange creatures which are found in the various rocks which lie beneath the surface of the earth. In order, however, that our youthful readers may enter with additional interest into our description of these extraordinary creatures, they should avail themselves of opportunities for examining the fossil remains of these beings with their own eyes. In many of the public museums of this country they are to be found. Often have we entered the spacious galleries of the British Museum in London, to examine these wonderful relics of distant ages. Indeed, these and the Sculptures of Nineveh present to our mind the greatest attraction which that vast collection can afford.

Our frontispiece represents a skeleton of a creature called the Megatherium. This name is made up of two Greek words, mega, which means great, and therion, which means beast. Now put these two together, and we have the meaning of the word Megatherium, namely, great beast. This huge monster appears to have had habits of life resembling those of the sloth, and to have subsisted, notwithstanding its great size and strength, on the simplest vegetable productions. It exceeded in size the largest rhinoceros, was armed with claws of enormous length and power, and in its whole frame exhibited a remarkable degree of solidity. Some specimens give the measurement of five feet across the haunches, and the thigh bone was nearly three times as thick as that of an elephant. The spinal cord must have been a foot in diameter, and the tail, at the nearest part of the body, twice as large, or six feet in circumference. The girth of the body was fourteen feet and a half, and the length eighteen feet. The teeth were admirably adapted for cutting vegetable substances, and the general structure and strength of the frame for tearing up the ground in search of roots, wrenching off the branches of trees, and uprooting their trunks, on which it principally fed. Heavily constructed and ponderously accoutred," says Dr. Buckland, "it could neither run nor leap, nor climb, nor burrow under ground; and all its movements must have been necessarily slow. But what need of speed for flight from foes to a creature which, by a single pat of his paw or lash of his tail, could in one in

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stant have demolished the conguar or the crocodile? Secure within the panoply of his strong armour, where was the enemy that would dare encounter this leviathan of the pampas? or in what more powerful creature can we find the cause that has effected the extirpation of his race? His entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, adapted exactly to the work it had to do. Strong and ponderous in proportion as this work was heavy, and calculated to be the vehicle of life and enjoyment to a gigantic race of quadrupeds, which, though they have ceased to be counted among the living inhabitants of our planet, have, in their fossil bones, left behind them imperishable monuments of the consummate skill with which they were constructed."

The Iguanodon. This is an enormous creature, shaped like a lizard, or the fabled dragon. There is a creature still inhabiting the West Indies, and different parts of South America, called the Iguana, and as the shape of the monstrous creature called the Iguanodon must have borne some resemblance to the Iguana, it has received the name which it bears. It had a head something like an enormous goose, but with a hooked bill, and large eyes, a long neck, short but massive limbs, a thick and comparatively short body, and a tail of enormous length, like the tail of a crocodile; but as it stretched to a greater length, it gradually tapered off to less bulky proportions. This terrific monster of antiquity was, according to general opinion, an amphibious creature-an inhabitant of both land and water.

The name of Iguanodon was first given to this creature by Dr. Mantel, who discovered the remains of one, of fifty or sixty feet in length, in Tilgate Forest, Sussex. In May, 1835, another interesting specimen of the Iguanodon skeleton was discovered in the sparkling sand formation in the neighbourhood of Maidstone, and has been placed in the museum of Dr. Mantel, at Brighton. The quarry in which those remains occurred consists of many strata, regularly alternating, of compact limestone, and of sand more or less loose. The animal when living must have been upwards of sixty feet in length. The bones are imbedded in the stone in a very confused manner, and all of them are more or less distorted by the compression they have undergone since their first envelopment in the rock, which, we need scarcely observe, was originally sand. The recent Iguana, as is well known, lives chiefly upon vegetables; and it is furnished with long and slender toes, by which it is enabled to climb trees with great facility in search of food; but no tree could have borne the weight of the colossal Iguanodon. Its enormous bulk would require to be

supported by feet of corresponding solidity; accordingly we find that the hind feet, as in the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, were composed of strong, short, massy bones, and furnished with claws, not hooked, as in the Iguana, but compressed, as in the land tortoises. But in the fore feet or hands of the Iguanodon the bones are like to the fingers of the Iguana; long, slender, flexible, and armed with curved claw-bones; thus furnishing a prehensile instrument, to seize and tear to pieces the palms, arborescent ferns, and dragon-blood plants, which constituted the food of the Iguanodon.

In our next number we shall notice some other strange creatures of the ancient world. How wonderfully do the works of God display his wisdom, power, and goodness! All his works praise him, and summon us to love and serve him as the Great Creator.

THE Chinese people have long been famous for the growth and merchandise of Tea. This article attracted our merchants to the coasts of China, long before the country was thrown open to general intercourse with European nations. It renders us in a manner dependent upon the Chinese, and helps to in