Falling in Love

15. Big Animals

'The Atlantosaurus,' said I, pointing affectionately with a wave of my

left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct reptile, 'is

estimated to have had a total length of one hundred feet, and was

probably the very biggest lizard that ever lived, even in Western

America, where his earthly remains were first disinhumed by an

enthusiastic explorer.'

'Yes, yes,' my friend answered abstractedly. 'Of course, of course;

things were all so very big in those days, you know, my dear fellow.'

'Excuse me,' I replied with polite incredulity; 'I really don't know to

what particular period of time the phrase "in those days" may be

supposed precisely to refer.'

My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I will admit that

I was taking a mean advantage of him. The professorial lecture in

private life, especially when followed by a strict examination, is quite

undeniably a most intolerable nuisance.) 'Well,' he said, in a crusty

voice, after a moment's hesitation, 'I mean, you know, in geological

times ... well, there, my dear fellow, things used all to be so _very_

big in those days, usedn't they?'

I took compassion upon him and let him off easily. 'You've had enough of

the museum,' I said with magnanimous self-denial. 'The Atlantosaurus has

broken the camel's back. Let's go and have a quiet cigarette in the park

outside.'

But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my forbearance so

far as to let you, too, off the remainder of that geological

disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A discourse which

would be quite unpardonable in social intercourse may be freely admitted

in the privacy of print; because, you see, while you can't easily tell a

man that his conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing

so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book whenever you

like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of hurting the author's

delicate susceptibilities.

The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the

conventional sermon, into two heads--the precise date of 'geological

times,' and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I

may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very

outset; first, that 'those days' never existed at all; and, secondly,

that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet are, on the

whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary

fauna that ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful

surface. I know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down

one more universal and cherished belief; everybody considers that

'geological animals' were ever so much bigger than their modern

representatives; but the interests of truth should always be paramount,

and, if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at

least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with

popular delusions as this erring planet.

What, then, is the ordinary idea of 'geological time' in the minds of

people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact

antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and

contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed

for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa

hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the

tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs

and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris

Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of

the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the

great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a

picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a

thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old

times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid

Tavern, while Shakespeare and Moli**, crowned with summer roses, sipped

their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the

Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to

produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of

Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors,

Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at

first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing

descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint

attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring

anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast lapse of

geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.

We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are

dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of ***,

each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each

of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of

innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose

pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief

lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to

the events narrated in this evening's _Pall Mall_, is less than a

second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can

possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of

Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he

has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarab****** Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most

Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good

grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years

ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from

the geological point of view, described as 'recent.' A shell embedded in

a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and

swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the

irruption of the 'Ancient Britons' of our inadequate school-books, is,

in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.

But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand

years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the

cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and

years, and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an

inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one

beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of

the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the

Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and

before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene,

immeasurably longer than all the others put together. These three make

up in their sum the Tertiary period, which entire period can hardly have

occupied more time in its passage than a single division of the

Secondary, such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and

the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling

duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the

unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary

***. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's mystic

head, 'Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The time we know affords us no

measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we

know not; and the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and more

inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes,

into its dimmest and earliest recesses.

These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one's head swim; let us

hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny bigness of our

earthly animals, living or extinct.

If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and terrestrial,

we shall soon see that we could bring together at the present moment a

very goodly collection of extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too,

each about as fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has

ever preceded it. Every age has its own _specialit* in the way of

bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing

overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in

another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic

proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax

fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or

the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs

or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is

most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist

who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known

to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' and 'Challengers,'

but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will

doubtless stand aghast at the huge skeletons of our whales and our

razorbacks, and will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in

the exact words of my friend at South Kensington, 'Things used all to be

so very big in those days, usedn't they?'

Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans and of

'geological' animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the Western

American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very largest

creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire

length is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no complete

skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature he appears to have

stood some thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a

very big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or

two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British

Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height and

size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good length of

seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to eighty, ninety, and

even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly entitled to say that we have at

least one species of animal now living which, occasionally at any rate,

equals in size the very biggest and most colossal form known

inferentially to geological science. Indeed when we consider the

extraordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as

compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge

Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a

decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic

Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, _in propria persona_. I

doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur

could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a full-grown family

razor-back whale. The mental picture of these unwieldy monsters hopping

casually about, like Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or

like that still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be

left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in

the details for himself as well as he is able.

If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens (always

an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of our contemporary

fauna, I venture confidently to claim for our own existing human period

as fine a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on this

planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if you are going to

lump all the extinct monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified

fauna, regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you; I

will candidly admit that there were more great men in all previous

generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from Agamemnon to

Wellington, than there are now existing in this last quarter of our

really very respectable nineteenth century. But if you compare honestly

age with age, one at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from

there being any falling off in the average bigness of things generally

in these latter days, there are more big things now living than there

ever were in any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the

'recent' period.

I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there

have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our

earth--the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type,

and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial

tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,'

because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe

that any one age has much surpassed another in the general size of its

fauna, since the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get

geological evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular

deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid

down under conditions unfavourable to the preservation of the remains of

large species. For example, the sediment now being accumulated at the

bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature

much larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big species

there swimming; and yet that fact does not negative the existence in

other places of whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami.

Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare

our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene times, we

shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the severest competition

that lies within our power under the actual circumstances.

In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very big

reptiles. 'A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth: For

him did his high sun flame and his river billowing ran: And he felt

himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race.' There was the

ichthyosaurus, a fish-like marine lizard, familiar to us all from a

thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers,

his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The

ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in

a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement,

the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed

twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent

size for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the

two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen

feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the

ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock-snakes,

which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the

waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of

course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our

British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in length, and

carried weight not exceeding three tons; but, his rival Ceteosaurus

stood ten feet high, and measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout

to the end of his tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be

briefly described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as

one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing

at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an

assemblage of species which could very favourably compete with the whole

lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to

tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could easily give points

to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.

The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium

and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in livestock;

but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came

near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same period

could have held their own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and

buffaloes; but, taking the group as a group, I don't think there is any

reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of

this present age.

For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still

possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus,

the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison,

the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are

generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and

most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and

ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment

of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of

fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now

sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the

camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New

Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is

more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one

hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American

Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our

bottleheads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four,

our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True

fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but some of

the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans.

The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity,

would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for the best

bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I would back our

modern carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus

that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for rhinodon, a gigantic shark of

the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a length of fifty

feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will stake my reputation

upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great

saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous

marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great

snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and

sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any

other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own for

colossal forms of animal life.

Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big

animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about

everything having been so very much bigger 'in those days' have become

extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological

point of view, quite recent.

For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is

more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when

he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the

familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the

mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was

hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still

living--at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in

Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the

wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its

fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of

geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off

the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his neighbour, the mastodon.

That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is

true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he

survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene--our day before

yesterday--and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint

weapons of the Abb Bourgeois' Miocene men. The period that separates

him from our own day is as nothing compared with the vast and

immeasurable interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians

of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with human

chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as Beau Brummel stands

to the modern masher, while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and

Assyrian warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.

Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that enormous bird who

was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the antelope; a monstrous emu,

as far surpassing the ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all

the other fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in the

strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen

Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little

time before the first white settlements in the great southern

archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live down to

the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments are

still discovered, with the ashes of the fireplace even now unscattered,

and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic bird lying in the very spot

where the natives left them after their destructive feasts. So, too,

with the big sharks. Our modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before

noted) to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, as

times go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure nearly two inches

long by one and a half broad, would disdain to make two bites of the

able-bodied British seaman. But the naturalists of the 'Challenger'

expedition dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar

teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to which they

originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning, have measured nearly a

hundred feet in length. This, no doubt, beats our biggest existing

shark, the rhinodon, by some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific

is a quite recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being

accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really nothing

astonishing in the discovery that some representatives of these colossal

carcharodons are to this day swimming about at their lordly leisure

among the coral reefs of the South Sea Islands. That very cautious

naturalist, Dr. G*****, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed

by merely saying: 'As we have no record of living individuals of that

bulk having been observed, the gigantic species to which these teeth

belonged must probably have become extinct within a comparatively recent

period.'

If these things are so, the question naturally suggests itself: Why

should certain types of animals have attained their greatest size at

certain different epochs, and been replaced at others by equally big

animals of wholly unlike sorts? The answer, I believe, is simply this:

Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more

than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great

group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its

decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development

has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been

supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure,

which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed by actual stress of

battle, but by irresistible competition for food and prey. The great

saurians were thus succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great

mammals are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least, by

the human species.

Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world, so

far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary record of the

geological remains.

The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe what is

otherwise quite probable, that life on our planet began with very small

forms--that it passed at first through a baby stage. The animals of the

Cambrian period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and

other simple, primitive types of life. There were as yet no vertebrates

of any sort, not even fishes, far less amphibians, reptiles, birds, or

mammals. The veritable giants of the Cambrian world were the

crustaceans, and especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly

exceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest trilobite is

some two feet long; and though we cannot by any means say that this was

really the largest form of animal life then existing, owing to the

extremely broken nature of the geological record, we have at least no

evidence that anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters.

The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to speak very

popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch, attained their culminating

point in the Silurian, waned in the Devonian, and died out utterly in

the Carboniferous seas.

It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish

tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the

squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this

or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of

invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and

powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (_teste_ Victor

Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural

advantages to back them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family

rapidly made their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced

thinkers and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once to be

the dominant creatures of the prim*** ocean in which they swam. There

were as yet no saurians or whales to dispute the dominion with these

rapacious cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the time

all their own way. Before the end of the Silurian Epoch, according to

that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande, they had blossomed forth into

no less than 1,622 distinct species. For a single family to develop so

enormous a variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a

single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense success in life;

and it also argues a vast lapse of time during which the different

species were gradually demarcated from one another.

Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish group, soon

attained a very considerable size; but a shell known as the orthoceras

(I wish my subject didn't compel me to use such _very_ long words, but I

am not personally answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of modern

scientific nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than that of any other

fossil mollusk, sometimes measuring as much as six feet in total length.

At what date the gigantic cuttles of the present day first began to make

their appearance it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies

are so soft that they could leave hardly anything behind in a fossil

state; but the largest known cuttle, measured by Mr. Gabriel, of

Newfoundland, was eighty feet in length, including the long arms.

These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the running so far as

colossal size is concerned, and it will be observed that here the

largest modern specimen immeasurably beats the largest fossil form of

the same type. I do not say that there were not fossil forms quite as

big as the gigantic calamaries of our own time--on the contrary, I

believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we must confess

that, in the matter of invertebrates at least, the balance of size is

all in favour of our own period.

The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the shape of fishes,

towards the close of the Silurian period, the second of the great

geological epochs. The earliest fish appear to have been small,

elongated, eel-like creatures, closely resembling the lampreys in

structure; but they rapidly developed in size and variety, and soon

became the ruling race in the waters of the ocean, where they maintained

their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary saurians. Even

then, in spite of the severe competition thus introduced, and still

later, in spite of the struggle for life against the huge modern

cetaceans (the true monarchs of the recent seas), the sharks continued

to hold their own as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day

their largest types probably rank second only to the whales in the whole

range of animated nature. There seems no reason to doubt that modern

fish, as a whole, quite equal in size the piscine fauna of any previous

geological age.

It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate group, the

amphibians, represented in our own world only by the frogs, the toads,

the newts, and the axolotls. Here we must certainly with shame confess

that the amphibians of old greatly surpassed their degenerate

descendants in our modern waters. The Japanese salamander, by far the

biggest among our existing newts, never exceeds a yard in length from

snout to tail; whereas some of the labyrinthodonts (forgive me once

more) of the Carboniferous Epoch must have reached at least seven or

eight feet from stem to stern. But the reason of this falling off is not

far to seek. When the adventurous newts and frogs of that remote period

first dropped their gills and hopped about inquiringly on the dry land,

under the shadow of the ancient tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were

the only terrestrial vertebrates then existing, and they had the field

(or, rather, the forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like

all dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth at their

ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big as donkeys, and efts

as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts' content in the marshy

lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small creatures which they found

in undisturbed possession of the Carboniferous isles. But as ages passed

away, and new improvements were slowly invented and patented by survival

of the fittest in the offices of nature, their own more advanced and

developed descendants, the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand

with them, and soon lived them down in the struggle for life, so that

this essentially intermediate form is now almost entirely restricted to

its one adapted seat, the pools and ditches that dry up in summer.

The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest modern forms are

simply nowhere beside the gigantic extinct species. First appearing on

the earth at the very close of the vast primary periods--in the Permian

age--they attained in secondary times the most colossal proportions, and

have certainly never since been exceeded in size by any later forms of

life in whatever direction. But one must remember that during the heyday

of the great saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals. The

place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses, as well as

the place now filled in the great continents by the elephants, the

rhinoceroses, the hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then

filled exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us

all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace

grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had _their_ day in the

secondary period. The forms into which they developed were certainly

every whit as large as any ever seen on the surface of this planet, but

not, as I have already shown, appreciably larger than those of the

biggest cetaceans known to science in our own time.

During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and pterodactyls

were playing such pranks before high heaven as might have made

contemporary angels weep, if they took any notice of saurian morality, a

small race of unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense

shades of the neighbouring forests which was destined at last to oust

the huge reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the

fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole planet. In

the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of

tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the

banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day. Throughout the

long lapse of the secondary ages, across the lias, the oolite, the

wealden, and the chalk, we find the mammalian race slowly developing

into opossums and kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and

antiquated continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the time for

the coming contest, increasing constantly in size of brain and keenness

of intelligence, the true mammals were able at last, towards the close

of the secondary ages, to enter the lists boldly against the gigantic

saurians. With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the

reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last

in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurs we get the huge cetaceans;

in place of the deinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place

of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man

himself.

The history of the great birds has been somewhat more singular. Unlike

the other main vertebrate classes, the birds (as if on purpose to

contradict the proverb) seem never yet to have had their day.

Unfortunately for them, or at least for their chance of producing

colossal species, their evolution went on side by side, apparently, with

that of the still more intelligent and more powerful mammals; so that,

wherever the mammalian type had once firmly established itself, the

birds were compelled to limit their aspirations to a very modest and

humble standard. Terrestrial mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so

in isolated regions, such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the birds had

things all their own way. In New Zealand, there are no indigenous

quadrupeds at all; and there the huge moa attained to dimensions almost

equalling those of the giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was

small and of low grade, so the gigantic ******* became the very biggest

of all known birds. At the same time, these big species acquired their

immense size at the cost of the distinctive birdlike habit of flight. A

flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the ostriches

compete practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with the

eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In like manner, when a pigeon

found its way to Mauritius, it developed into the practically wingless

dodo; while in the northern penguins, on their icy perches, the fore

limbs have been gradually modified into swimming organs, exactly

analogous to the flippers of the seal.

Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no representatives of

their greatness to future ages? On land at least that is very probable.

Man, diminutive man, who, if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger

than a silly sheep, and who only partially disguises his native

smallness by his acquired habit of walking erect on what ought to be his

hind legs--man has upset the whole balanced economy of nature, and is

everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great herbivores,

his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful

plains which were once laid down in prairie or scrubwood. Hence it seems

not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and

the buffalo must go. But we are still a long way off from that final

consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears

highly probable that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever

came out of it. Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal

of our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions,

seems far more problematical. The race is now no longer to the swift,

nor the battle to the strong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and

mind has gained the final victory over mere matter. Goliath of Gath has

shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as in the fairy tales

of old, it is cunning little Jack with his clever devices who wins the

day against the heavy, clumsy, muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our

'Minotaurs' and 'Warriors' that are the real leviathans and behemoths of

the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens

of the latter-day seas. Instead of developing individually into huge

proportions, the human race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires,

which compete with one another by means of huge armaments, and invent

mitrailleuses and torpedos of incredible ferocity for their mutual

destruction. The dragons of the prime that tare each other in their

slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armour-plated

turret-ships. Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern

seas of the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming geologist

of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the sunken 'Captain,'

or the plated scales of the 'Comte de Grasse,' firmly embedded in the

upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn

deprecation at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous

carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.