10 A NEW WHALE 



vegetarian, but Sir William Flower believed that 

 primitive Ungulates were omnivorous, as their least 

 modified descendants, the pigs, remain to this day. 

 Treacherous and misleading as is most popular zoology, 

 he considered that it was a true flash of intelligence 

 which caused sailors and fisher-folk to give to the 

 commoner and smaller cetaceans such names as Sea- 

 hog, Sea-pig, and Herring-hog. The French also, not 

 content with lending us porc-poisson to shorten into 

 'porpoise' have in turn borrowed meerschwein from 

 the Germans, and altered it to marsouin to denote 

 pig-fish or porpoise. 



' We may conclude (said Sir William Flower), by picturing 

 to ourselves some primitive, generalised, marsh-haunting 

 animals with scanty covering of hair like the modern hippo- 

 potamus, but with broad swimming tails and short limbs, 

 omnivorous in their mode of feeding, probably combining 

 water-plants with mussels, worms, and fresh- water crustaceans, 

 gradually becoming more and more adapted to fill the void 

 place ready for them on the aquatic side of the borderland 

 on which they dwelt, and so by degrees being modified 

 into dolphin-like creatures inhabiting lakes and rivers, and 

 ultimately finding their way into the ocean. . . . Favoured 

 by various conditions of temperature and climate, wealth of 

 food-supply, almost complete immunity from deadly enemies, 

 and illimitable expanses in which to roam, they have under- 

 gone the various modifications at which the cetacean type 

 has now arrived, and gradually attained that colossal magni- 

 tude which was not always an attribute of the animals of this 

 group.' 



Still, evolution has its limitations, and although a 

 March brown or a Mayfly changes in the twinkling of 



