264 BIG ANIMALS 



ceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest 

 trilobite is some two feet long ; and though we cannot by 

 any means say that this was really the largest form of animal 

 life then existing, owing to the extremely broken nature of 

 the geological record, we have at least no evidence that 

 anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters. 

 The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to 

 speak very popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch, 

 attained their culminating point in the Silurian, waned in 

 the Devonian, and died out utterly in the Carboniferous 

 seas. 



It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the 

 cuttle-fish tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, 

 the argonaut, the squid, and the octopus, first began to 

 make their appearance upon this or any other stage. The 

 cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrate 

 animals ; they are rapid swimmers ; they have large and 

 powerful eyes ; and they can easily enfold their prey (teste 

 Victor Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. 

 With these natural advantages to back them up, it is not 

 surprising that the cuttle family rapidly made their mark 

 in the world. They were by far the most advanced thinkers 

 and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once 

 to be the dominant creatures of the primaeval ocean in 

 which they swam. There were as yet no saurians or 

 whales to dispute the dominion with these rapacious 

 cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the 

 time all their ow,n way. Before the end of the Silurian 

 Epoch, according to that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande, 

 they had blossomed forth into no less than 1,622 distinct 

 species. For a single family to develop so enormous a 

 variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a 

 single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense 

 success in life ; and it also argues a vast lapse of time 



