Читать книгу A West Point Treasure; Or, Mark Mallory's Strange Find онлайн

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The two conspirators were watching him gleefully, occasionally exchanging sly glances. The Parson, all oblivious of this, surveyed one side of the fossil and then turned it over. He tapped it on the arm of his chair; he picked at it with his finger nail; he even tasted it, with scientific public-spiritedness and zeal. And then he cleared his throat solemnly and looked up.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “er—that is—ladies—this is a most interesting specimen we have here. I regret that with the brief analysis possible to me I cannot classify it as I should like. A microscopic examination would be undoubtedly essential for that. But some things I can say. This is evidently a fossil bone, a portion of the thigh bone, I should say, probably of some gigantic animal like the Ichthyosaurus. As you will notice from the compactness of the structure and the heaviness, it is much solidified, thus indicating a very remote age, probably the upper Cretaceous at the very least, or possibly the Silurian. I am not able to say positively because——”