Animals Before Man 



changed, and some of these changes have taken 

 place in our own day and almost under our very 

 eyes. The bison has been practically swept out 

 of existence, and his doom was sealed w^hen the 

 white man first settled here. But other and 

 different bison had lived and died before this 

 one came upon the scene, and these in turn took 

 the place of other creatures. For there has 

 been a constant change among the animals of 

 this country, and they have been very dift'erent 

 at different periods. Could one see examples 

 of them in some great zoological garden, it 

 might be imagined not only that they had been 

 brought together from very remote regions, but 

 that some of them had come from quite another 

 world. Museums have done a great deal of late 

 years to make us acquainted with these extreme- 

 ly ancient animals, but much of the knowl- 

 edge thus acquired is fragmentary in every 

 sense of the word. It is one of the purposes 

 of this book to clothe such fragments, so far as 

 may be, with flesh and blood, and make the 

 reader acquainted with some of these early ani- 

 mals of the continent. For these objects are 



2 



