94 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE. 



pulpy fruit is in itself a mere waste of produc- 

 tive energy to its mother, unless the pulpiness 

 aids in the dispersion and promotes the wel- 

 fare of the young seedlings. Accordingly, we 

 might naturally expect that there would be 

 no fruit-bearers on the earth until the time 

 when fruit-eaters, actual or potential, arrived 

 upon the scene : or, to put it more correctly, 

 both must inevitably have developed simul- 

 taneously and in mutual dependence upon 

 one another. So we find no traces of succu- 

 lent fruits even in so late a formation as that 

 of these lias or cretaceous cliffs. The birds 

 of that day were fierce-toothed carnivores, 

 devouring the lizards and saurians of the 

 rank low-lying sea-marshes : the mammals 

 were mostly primaeval kangaroos or low an- 

 cestral wombats, gentle herbivores, or savage 

 marsupial wolves, like the Tasmanian devil 

 of our own times. It is only in the very 

 modern tertiary period, whose soft muddy 

 deposits have not yet had time to harden 

 under superincumbent pressure into solid 



