The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 163 



yet have feigned." And the age of Mammals had its 

 Mastodon with tusks twelve and fourteen feet long, its 

 Glyptodon with a solidified bony armor on its back nine 

 feet across and weighing nearly four thousand pounds, its 

 Megatherium with clawed feet a yard in length, and its 

 Machairodus, a tiger whose open mouth was an arsenal set 

 with natural swords. 



How terrible must have been the contests of such 

 monsters with each other, and the slaughter made by them 

 on their weaker and less protected neighbors, most truly 

 "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin"! How dif- 

 ferent the scenes of their world from the peace and repose 

 that Miltonic poets have loved to picture as the condition 

 of the earth " before the advent of man and sin " ! The 

 sea was alive with animal frigates, the land with self-mov- 

 ing Krupp cannon, the sky with literally "flying artillery." 

 The modern question between steel plate and steel shot, 

 tried of late by the Merrimac and the Monitor, was tried 

 of old as a principle between ivory tooth and horny scale 

 by many a Megalosaur and Mosasaur, carnivore and pachy- 

 derm, each increasing, as now, the force and size of the 

 assailing weapon, as the other increased the thickness and 

 strength of the defensive plate. The physical stuff of 

 which a Nelson and a Napoleon, a Paul Jones and a Far- 

 ragut, were afterwards made, cruised, perhaps, around the 

 headlands of England, and marched, perhaps, across the 

 wilds of Europe and America, ages before their day, as 

 Dinichthys and Dinosaur, Machairodus and Megathere. 

 Battles of Trafalgar and the Nile, of Marathon and Water- 

 loo, deciding the fate of great animal kingdoms, were 

 fought, to begin with, under far off Triassic and Mesozoic 

 skies. And whether or not Tennyson's lines are true of 

 the future, 



" And there rained a ghastly dew 



From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue," 



they have been true of the past, the "airy navies" being 

 those of such great reptile birds as the Pteranodon and 

 Pterodactyl, the latter with a wing-spread of twenty-five 

 feet. 



What has been the result of this long, ferocious war, 

 as related to the various kinds of armor used by its combat- 

 ants ? The records of the rocks conclusively answer. It 

 has been the overwhelming of nearly all the races and 



