628 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ago, although there is little doubt that it is now extinct. The Baron, 

 moreover, does not believe that its extinction was due to destruction 

 by the hunters, but that it was a survival from a past age, doomed to 





V VV VV A.-\= .v -'^-^ ^ 



Fig. 3. Rhytina stelleri, reconstructed. 



extinction, which overtook it when it was driven from its pastures on 

 the shore of Behring Island. It attained a length of twenty-five feet, 

 and had a skin composed of horny tubes, sometimes an inch long, 

 wrinkled like the bark of a tree, which served to protect it from the 

 ice and rocks on which it fed. It had no teeth, but its jaws were cov- 

 ered with an undulating surface of horny, tubular matter ; and it 

 was a vegetable-feeder, resembling in habits and qualities the other 

 members of the family. 



THE MACHINERY OF ELECTIVE GOVERNMENT. 



By Professor GOLDWIN SMITH. 



IT is not necessary, for the purpose of this paper, to enter into any 

 comparison between hereditary and elective government. Mani- 

 fest it is that the era of elective government has come. In the com- 

 munities of the New World, the latest development of humanity, the 

 hereditary principle, has failed to take root ; the monarchy of Brazil 

 being merely a European dynasty in exile, the life of which hangs 

 by a thread. In the Old World dynasticism is plainly in a state of 

 decadence, the forms surviving longest, as might have been expected, 

 where the substance had been most completely abolished. The era 

 of elective government has come, and in the wise ordering of it, so as 

 to give public reason the upper hand, and to reduce as far as possible 

 the influence of passion, class interest, selfish ambition, faction, and 

 corruption, lies the political hope of the world. If hereditary monarchy 

 and aristocracy are dead or doomed, dead also is the light hope of the 

 Revolution that all the evils of government would be swept away and 

 the reign of reason and justice at once opened, if only monarchy could 

 be overthrown. The divinity of the people has proved almost as un- 

 like reality as the divinity of kings. It is time that the form of gov- 

 ernment should, if possible, be settled, and the political revolution 



