“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 authors 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 Shakespere and Molière, 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 laps 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
æons, 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 scarabæus of 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 æons. 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 _spécialité_ 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 razor-backs, 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 unfavorable 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 fishlike 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
favorably 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
bottle-heads 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 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 neighbor, 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 Abbé 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 fire-place 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. Günther, 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, wandered 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 primæval 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 favor 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 neighboring 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 ichthyosaurus we get the
huge cetaceans; in place of the dinosaurs 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 æpyornis
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 forelimbs 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 scrub-wood.
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 torpedoes
of incredible ferocity for their mutual destruction. The dragons of
the prime that tore each other in their slime have yielded place to
eighty-ton guns and armor-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.—_Cornhill Magazine._