240 WALKS AND TALKS. 



but then they dwindled away. In modern times, our famil- 

 iar bony-scaled gar-pike haunts the freshened waters of river 

 and lake the poor degenerate descendant of ancestors which 

 once dominated over the world. Venerable relic of a mighty 

 empire! Were the lineal descendant of Menes or Nebuchad- 

 nezzar to stand before me, the antiquity of his lineage would 

 inspire my interest and veneration, but it would be as yester- 

 day compared with the lineage of this poor gar-pike. 



Why have these creatures been preserved in existence so 

 long? The march of organic improvement has advanced for 

 thousands upon thousands of centuries, and left them far in 

 the rear. These forms are misplaced in the modern world. 

 They constitute an anachronism, which is either an absurdity, 

 or a phenomenon too full of meaning for ordinary compre- 

 hension. The gar-pike destroys our game-fish and our market- 

 fish as he ravaged neighboring kingdoms while he ruled an 

 empire of his own. He tangles and tears the nets of the 

 fishermen, who visit their execrations upon him. His flesh is 

 unpalatable for food. The mud-loving sturgeon, less destruc- 

 tive in his nature, brings no utility into the modern world. 

 The fierce shark, equally unfit for food, is the free-booter of 

 the ocean. Other fishes furnish aliment to man. They came 

 from unknown realms to meet man here, and serve his ends. 

 But these archaic types linger from a time when human wants 

 had as yet no existence, when human food was not demanded. 

 They were never intended for food, since they made food of 

 every other creature. These useless and destructive beings 

 are out of joint with the world and with history. Why are 

 they here? 



Why ? They come to import ideas into the modern world. 

 They bring down to us living illustrations of faunas passed 

 away. The plates of Cephalaspis and the spines of Machcera- 

 canthus quarried from the rock might pique our curiosity and 

 distress us by their mystery ; but they would not instruct. It 

 was intended that the intelligence of the being which always 

 stood as the finality of organic improvement should grasp the 

 conception of the world, and reproduce the grand history of 



