42 THE MA3IMALIA. 



connected with the advantageous reduction of the toes. The 

 hippopotamus family has taken an opposite course; from being an 

 animal that liked the marshy soil of primaeval forests, it has become 

 almost an aquatic creature (suckling its young in the water), and 

 accordingly has preserved the completeness of hand and foot, the 

 four toes almost fully developed. As regards dentition, also, the 

 hippopotamus shows signs of being, geologically, very old. The 

 skull of the unwieldy creature reminds one of a clumsily-formed 

 box. The breadth and height of the muzzle are produced by the 

 enormous development of the middle incisors and canines, all of 

 which teeth are furnished with roots that are not closed, but open 

 wide apart." * 



The great antiquity of the hippopotamus is also brought home 

 to us by the fact that species have been found in Madagascar, 

 where their remains were embedded in marshy deposits, together 

 with those of the colossal bird, yEpyornis. Now, granting that 

 Africa and Madagascar were, at one time, connected by land, their 

 separation must have taken place early in the Tertiary, and 

 accordingly the stability of the genus hippopotamus is also proved 

 from a geological point of view. 



Nature has certainly improved in her conceptions of animal 

 beauty as time has gone on. The ancient reptiles rivalled one 

 another in hideousness of form, and the more ancient types of 

 mammals, which have survived to our own day, are grotesquely 

 ugly ; such, for instance, as the elephant, the hippopotamus, the 

 rhinoceros, and even that useful friend of man, the pig. Most of 

 their early contemporaries seem to have been still uglier, but at 

 least they did not live to distress the artistic eye of man with their 

 uncouth forms. And man himself has much improved upon the 

 ancient Miocene form, which survives, almost unchanged, in the 

 modern anthropomorphic apes. Though the law of natural 

 selection plays a less important part in the development of species 

 than we once thought it did, at least we can give to its action the 

 credit of having made improvements in beauty. 



The pedigree of the other family of tuberculate-toothed, 

 hoofed animals — the Suidce, or hogs and peccaries — is a very 

 ancient one. It can be traced back to the Eocene, when the 



* Cope. 



