A BIG FOSSIL BONE. 73 



birds were moas, all the lizards were croco- 

 diles, and all the snails were monstrous 

 ammonites. Everywhere they seem to find 

 in fossil forms a bigger animal of each kind 

 than any now existing. They see here an 

 enormous Irish elk, there an immense extinct 

 sloth, yonder a vast prototype of the little 

 modern armadillo, and somewhere else a 

 turtle ten times as big as the greatest living 

 member of the tortoise group. They forget 

 that the huge saurians were secondary 

 animals, while the deinotherium was tertiary, 

 the mammoth quaternary, and the moa all 

 but modern. They forget that the age of the 

 great ammonites was almost over before the 

 age of the great lizards set in. They forget 

 that the glyptodon lived in South America, 

 while the big elk lived in Ireland. By that 

 kind of false historical perspective which 

 throws all the distant past into a single line, 

 they roll together millions and millions of 

 years ; and so they get a distorted geological 

 picture, which really quite reverses the actual 



