Great Salamanders and their Associates 



air was heavy with carbonic acid, teeming with 

 moisture, hot and steamy with tropical heat. 



Flowering plants were few in number, their 

 blossoms small and inconspicuous, and neither 

 bees nor butterflies existed, for all these are de- 

 pendent one upon another; nectar must exist 

 to attract the insect, the insect in turn must be 

 present to bear pollen from flower to flower. 

 Birds, too, with color and song, were still in 

 the futui'e. Compared with the present, it was 

 a colorless, gloomy, silent world, peopled by 

 amphibians and reptiles, but not without its 

 compensations in the utter absence of toil 

 and care. Such was the realm of the Stego- 

 cephala. 



While, so far as numbers go, amphibians 

 reached their maximum during the period of 

 coal-forming forests, their culminating point in 

 size was in the Trias, just before their extinc- 

 tion. Sharks and armored fishes had declined, 

 dinosaurs had not become paramount, and dur- 

 ing the interregnum there was, so to speak, a 

 silent struggle for supremacy between amphib- 

 ian and reptilian types. Until very recently 



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