A GIANT AMONG SEALS 227 



inferior in point of size to any of its extinct relatives. 

 The giraffe, again, which in the Mount Elgon district is 

 stated to tower to twenty feet, is much taller than any extinct 

 quadruped yet known to us ; and the hippopotamus falls 

 but little short of its ancestors of the Pleistocene epoch. 

 The elands, again, are by far the largest of antelopes 

 known at any period of the earth's history; and the 

 ostrich, although not comparable with some of the New 

 Zealand moas (which, by the way, were probably exter- 

 minated only a few centuries ago by the Maoris), is yet 

 the largest member of its own particular group. Again, 

 no fossil ape is known which is anywhere in the running 

 as compared with a full-grown male gorilla. It is, more- 

 over, probable, despite the old-world legends of giants, 

 that man at the present day is, on the whole, a taller and 

 finer animal than he ever was before. 



Of course, there are certain cases where the animals of 

 to-day cannot compare with some of their predecessors, 

 and a case in point is afforded by the extinct atlas tor- 

 toise of Northern India, which (although its size has 

 been vastly exaggerated) far exceeded in bulk its living 

 cousins of the Galapagos and Mascarenes. This, however, 

 may perhaps be accounted for by the larger area of its 

 habitat. 



Among the inhabitants of the ocean we shall find even 

 more striking testimony as to the large bodily size (either 

 absolute or relative) attained by many animals of the 

 present day. Probably no mollusc was ever larger than 

 the giant clam, whose valves measure a yard or more in 

 length ; and we have no evidence that the enormous cuttles 

 and squids forming the food of the sperm-whale were 

 ever rivalled in size during past epochs. The huge long- 

 limbed crab of the Japanese seas, and the cocoanut crab 



