BIG ANIMALS 257 



Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or like that 

 still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must 

 be left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, 

 who may fill in the details for himself as well as he is 

 able. 



If we turn from the particular comparison of selected 

 specimens (always an unfair method of judging) to the 

 general aspect of our contemporary fauna, I venture con- 

 fidently to claim for our own existing human period as fine 

 a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on 

 this planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if 

 you are going to lump all the extinct monsters and horrors 

 into one imaginary unified fauna, regardless of anachron- 

 isms, I have nothing more to say to you ; I will candidly 

 admit that there were more great men in all previous 

 generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from 

 Agamemnon to Wellington, than there are now existing in 

 this last quarter of our really very respectable nineteenth 

 century. But if you compare honestly, age with age, one 

 at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from there 

 being any falling off in the average bigness of things 

 generally in these latter days, there are more big things 

 now living than there ever were in any one single epoch, 

 even of much longer duration than the ' recent ' period, 



I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before 

 us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals 

 in the history of our earth the Jurassic period, which was 

 the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which 

 was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. 

 I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,' because, 

 as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself be- 

 lieve that any one age has much surpassed another in the 

 general size of its fauna, since the Permian Epoch at 

 least ; and where we do not get geological evidence of the 



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