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CHAPTER I 



MAN AND HIS RELATION TO THE 



LIVING WORLD 



UNDISPUTED master of the world, man dominates 

 the earth at the present time. But this was 

 not always so. In the geologic age just past, 

 the Pleistocene or Ice Age, the earth was dominated 

 by a great array of different mammals many of which 

 were of large size and occurred in great abundance. 



Though man existed at this time, his potentialities 

 for development were restricted and more or less 

 closely circumscribed by the competition of these 

 four-footed creatures which threatened his food plants 

 and his meager crops and menaced his relatively 

 feeble body. 



So during the Pleistocene man played only a minor 

 part and left scarcely an imprint beyond mere records 

 of his existence which in the earlier portion of the 

 Pleistocene become extremely scanty. 



Long before the Pleistocene, in those far distant 

 periods known to geologists as the Cretaceous and 

 Jurassic, there was no trace of man. The mammals, 

 though numerous — at least in the Cretaceous — were 

 all very small and insignificant. Then the earth was 

 dominated by a vast and formidable array of reptiles, 

 on the land, in the sea, and in the air, many of which 

 were very large and some of gigantic size, several 

 times as large as the largest elephants. 



