190 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



side leaving only two species of elephants as reminders 

 of the time when the greater part of the world was 

 theirs. 1 



It has been, and it is, an ever-changing world. The 

 great difference between past and present is that now 

 by the agency of man it is changing much more rapidly. 

 Man with his disregard of the past and small thought of 

 the future destroys in a year what it took Nature ages 

 to produce man sweeps away forests, the growth of 

 centuries, and with them wipes out of existence races of 

 animals that represent the culmination of thousands of 

 years of evolution ever onward and upward. So 

 rapidly is this extermination taking place that Professor 

 Osborn believes that "By the middle of this century 

 man will be alone amid the ruins of the mammalian 

 world he has destroyed, the period of the Age of Mam- 

 mals will have entirely closed, and the Age of Man will 

 have reached a numerical climax, from which some 

 statisticians believe it will probably recede, because we 

 are approaching the point of the overpopulation of the 

 earth in three of the five great continents." 



With the disappearance of the forests comes the 

 shrinking of streams and at the same time the sweeping 

 away by floods of fertile soil that results from long ages 

 of growth. 



Moreover, man turns his attention to his fellow man 

 and blots out whole races, or, if they survive, it is with 

 changed customs. 



We live, as we are often told, in a period of transition 

 and no one with certainty may predict the outcome. 

 Meanwhile Nature, who has in Time a mute but resist- 



J The African Elephant has been subdivided into about a dozen species, 

 but whether these are all good species or simply local races or sub- 

 species remains to !><> shown. 



