BIG ANIMALS 261 



when they talk vaguely about everything having been so 

 very much bigger ' hi those days ' have become extinct 

 within a very late period, and are often, from the geological 

 point of view, quite recent. 



For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I 

 suppose no animal is more frequently present to the mind 

 of the non-geological speaker, when he talks indefinitely 

 about the great extinct monsters, than the familiar figure 

 of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the 

 mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of 

 yesterday. He was hunted here in England by men whose 

 descendants are probably still living at least so Professor 

 Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us ; while in Siberia his 

 frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the 

 wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question 

 as to its fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the 

 yesterday of geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch 

 that finally killed off the last mammoth. Then, again, 

 there is his neighbour, the mastodon. That big tertiary 

 proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is true, to 

 be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he 

 survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene our day 

 before yesterday and he often fell very likely before the 

 fire-split flint weapons of the Abbe Bourgeois' Miocene 

 men. The period that separates him from our own day is 

 as nothing compared with the vast and immeasurable 

 interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians 

 of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of 

 time with human chronology, the mastodon stands to our 

 own fauna as Beau Brummel stands to the modern masher, 

 while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and Assyrian 

 warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the 

 Mahdi. 



Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that 



