BIO ANIMALS 253 



them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and 

 the moa hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and 

 the ammonite ; in which the tertiary megatherium goes 

 cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs and the pri- 

 mary trilobites ; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris 

 Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic 

 club-mosses of the Carboniferous period, and to have been 

 successfully hunted by the great marine lizards and flying 

 dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really 

 just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand 

 times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand 

 old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes to- 

 gether in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and 

 Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Faler- 

 nian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the 

 Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they 

 were to produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on 

 the occasion of Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his 

 victorious brother emperors, Ramses and Sardanapalus. 

 This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at first sight 

 imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing de- 

 scriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida ; it is a 

 faint attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical 

 time the glaring anachronisms perpetually committed as 

 regards the vast lapse of geological chronology even by 

 well-informed and intelligent people. 



We must remember, then, that in dealing with geologi- 

 cal time we are dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and 

 unimaginable series of aeons, each of which occupied its 

 own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each of which 

 saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall 

 of innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic 

 clock, by whose pendulum alone we can faintly measure 

 the dim ages behind us, the brief lapse of historical time, 



