BIG ANIMALS 259 



and measure round the waist as much as a London 

 alderman of the noblest proportions. Of course, other 

 Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our 

 British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in 

 length, and carried weight not exceeding three tons ; but 

 his rival Ceteosaurus stood ten feet high, and measured 

 fifty feet from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail ; 

 while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be briefly de- 

 scribed as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus 

 as one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we 

 have certainly nothing at all to come up to these ; but our 

 cetaceans, as a group, show an assemblage of species 

 which could very favourably compete with the whole lot of 

 Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came 

 to tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could 

 easily give points to any deinosaur that ever moved upon 

 oolitic continents. 



The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as 

 the deinotherium and the mastodon, were also, in their 

 way, very big things in livestock; but they scarcely ex- 

 ceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came near 

 the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same 

 period could have held their own well against our existing 

 giraffes, elks, and buffaloes ; but, taking the group as a 

 group, I don't think there is any reason to believe that it 

 beat in general aspect the living fauna of this present age. 



For few people ever really remember how very many 

 big animals we still possess. We have the Indian and the 

 African elephant, the hippopotamus, the various rhinoce- 

 roses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison, the musk 

 ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals 

 are generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terres- 

 trial rivals, and most people lump all our big existing 

 cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales, 



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