DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES. 113 



" The eai-tli was our empire, the reahn of the aquatic birds in the 

 Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters. 

 An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron 

 then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor 

 pursue; the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on 

 every side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs, 

 winged fish, infested the uncertain limits of the two elements. What 

 would ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-born of the world ? 

 The Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged 

 against the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the 

 bird, attaininor the dimensions of an Ana,k, shrunk not from battle 

 with the giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these 

 events, God's gi-and record narrates them in the depths of the earth, 

 where she deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters 

 exterminated by us, and we who have exterminated them. 



" Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human 

 Hercules. What had his club availed against the plesiosaurus ? Who 

 would have met, face to face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of 

 flight was absolutely needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the 

 loftiest height bore downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an 

 eagle twenty feet in stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, 

 the implacable hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the 

 water, and in the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless 

 hostility. 



" Man had perished a hundred times. Through our agency man 

 became possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished 

 that these awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the 

 conquerors, wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a 

 feeble Perseus, a pale and lustreless memory of our heroic 

 times ? 



"Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by 

 our very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division 

 of the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the 

 waters, we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests 



8 



