234 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



half a dozen very distinct species are still found 

 in Asia and Africa. 



All these great creatures wandered in herds 

 to and fro across the grassy Cahfornian plains 

 and among the reaches of open forest. Prey- 

 ing upon them were certain carnivores grimmer 

 and more terrible than any now existing. The 

 most distinctive and seemingly the most plen- 

 tiful was the sabretooth. This was a huge, 

 squat, short-tailed, heavily built cat with upper 

 canines which had developed to an almost 

 walrus-like length; only, instead of being round 

 and blunt like walrus tusks, they were sharp, 

 with a thin, cutting edge, so that they really 

 were entitled to be called sabres or daggers. 

 Whether the creature was colored like a lion 

 or like a tiger or like neither, we do not know, 

 for it had no connection with either save its 

 remote kinship with all the cats. The sabre- 

 tooth cats, like the true cats, had gone through 

 an immensely long period of developmental his- 

 tory in North iVmerica, although they did not 

 appear here as early as the little camels and 

 horses. Far back across the ages, at or just 

 after the close of the Eocene — the '*dawn age" 

 of mammalian life — certain moderate-sized or 

 small cat-like creatures existed on this continent, 

 doubtless ancestral to the sabretooth, but so 



