i895-9 6 Popular Delusions in Natural History. 181 



fish it is ? — is it a perch, do you think ? " That the fishes of 

 the Old Eed Sandstone lived and moved and had their being 

 at a time when the perch of our modern lakes was a thing of 

 the far-distant future is an idea which never apparently has 

 been presented to their minds. 



But there are plenty of people who have heard in a general 

 way of extinct animals, — great "dragons of the prime," 

 Ichthyosauri, Plesiosauri, mammoths, mastodons, and so forth ; 

 but the total want of conception of geological time to which 

 I have above alluded leads to the delusion that all those were 

 contemporaneous with early man — a delusion no doubt partly 

 derived from the old idea which prevailed before Geology 

 became a science, that fossils are the remains of the creatures 

 which perished in the Noachian Deluge. You may often, 

 indeed, in newspaper notices see the term " prehistoric " 

 applied to fossils of palaeozoic times, as if they belonged to 

 the same category of things as the celts and flint arrow-heads 

 of the early human period. And in a set of amusing drawings 

 recently published in ' Punch ' under the name of " Prehistoric 

 Peeps " you will see our supposed primitive ancestors disport- 

 ing themselves in the company not only of mammoths, but 

 mesozoic reptiles which were extinct countless ages before 

 man appeared on the world at all. It is true that many 

 extinct mammals of the Quaternary period, which geologically 

 speaking is but as yesterday, were contemporaneous with early 

 man, — but not the reptiles of the Lias or Wealden ! Possibly 

 the artist who drew these pictures was not ignorant of the 

 difference in geological age between a mammoth and an 

 Iguanoclon, and meant the whole thing for a joke, which my 

 obtuse northern head fails to appreciate, and it might be asked, 

 Is it not equally legitimate caricature to represent a primeval 

 savage encountering a Liassic reptile as playing at billiards 

 or riding in a hansom ? Or was John Leech in the wrong 

 when in the ' Comic History of Eome ' he represented the 

 Sabine women in the costume of Englishwomen of the middle 

 of the present century, or depicted Mars courting the Vestal 

 Virgin in the uniform of a smart British Life-guardsman ? 

 No ; in the latter case we have simply ludicrous incongruities 

 which every one understands ; in the former we have absolute 

 untruth, which is not real caricature, and which, besides, serves 



