36 EXTINCT MONSTERS. 



India, and China; and you will find that our discoveries in 

 geology, astronomy, and ethnology go far to prove that the 

 traditions of these ancient peoples, however derived, after making 

 due allowance for Oriental allegory and poetic hyperbole, are not 

 far from the truth. To the Babylonian tradition of the monstrous 

 forms of life at first created we have already alluded ; but in other 

 fields of discovery we find the same foreshadowing of discoveries 

 made in our own day. Take the vast cycles of Egyptian tradition, 

 wherein the stars returned to their places after a circle of constant 

 change, only to start again on their unwearied round ; the atomic 

 theory of Lucretius, now expanded and incorporated into modern 

 chemistry; or the philosopher's pregnant saying — Omjie vivum 

 ex ovo (" Every living thing comes from an egg "). These and other 

 examples might be cited to show how true the old saying is, 

 " There is nothing new under the sun." In the writings of ancient 

 authors may be found singular notices of bones and skeletons 

 found in "the bowels of the earth," which are referred to an 

 imaginary era of long ago, when giants of huge dimensions walked 

 this earth. One is inclined sometimes to wonder whether the old 

 fables of griffins and horrid dragons may not be to some extent 

 based upon the occasional discovery, in former times, of fossil 

 bones, such as evidently belonged to animals the like of which 

 are not to be seen nowadays. (See chaps, xiii. and xiv.) 



The illustrious Cuvier, in his day, considered the fish -lizard to be 

 one of the most heteroclite and monstrous animals ever discovered. 

 He said of this creature that it possessed the snout of a dolphin, 

 the teeth of a crocodile, the head and breast-bone of a lizard, the 

 paddles of a whale or dolphin, and the vertebrae of a fish ! No 

 wonder that naturalists and palaeontologists, whose realm is the 

 natural history of the past, were obliged to make a new division, 

 or order, of reptiles to accommodate the fish-lizard. It is obvious 

 that a creature with such very "mixed" relationships would be 

 out of place in any of the four orders into which living reptiles, 

 as represented by turtles, snakes, lizards, and crocodiles are 



