IMPRESSIONIST SKETCH 321 



Keeping, however, to recent animal history, where are 

 the bears who had their dens in Athole, or the wild boars 

 of the great Caledonian forest, or the busy beavers who cut 

 their logs in the Pass of Killiecrankie, or the white bulls who 

 wallowed in the dark waters of the hidden tarns, or the 

 wolves with which Wales paid her tax to King Edgar ? 



Or, again, where are the early companions and rivals 

 of our forefathers in Britain the cave-lion, the cave-bear, 

 the cave-hyaena, the shaggy mammoth and the woolly 

 rhinoceros ? We know them only by their bones in the 

 caves, though it may be that our inheritance still includes 

 some of the hardihood, wisdom, and gentleness which they 

 and others like them helped to work out in man. 



Or, going much further back, where are the delicately 

 beautiful graptolites, the quaint trilobites, the giant sea- 

 scorpions, the ancient heavily-armoured fishes, the giant 

 amphibians, the monstrous terrestrial reptiles, the huge 

 sea-serpents or Pythonomorphs, the flying dragons, the 

 toothed birds, the old-fashioned early mammals. The 

 most powerful, the most fertile have not been spared, even 

 those which seem as though they had been built not for 

 years but for eternity, have wholly passed away without 

 leaving any direct descendants to-day. This is no case of 

 leaves falling from off the tree ; it is a lopping of branches. 



For some of these lost races, competition was doubtless 

 too keen they outlived their prosperity and went to the 

 wall ; for others, the force of changing circumstances was 

 too strong they were not plastic enough to change ; for 

 others, perhaps, over-specialisation or gigantic size or 

 feverish activity was fatal ; for others, it may be that their 

 constitution was in some critical respect at fault, and that 

 they went down to destruction, as Lucretius finely phrased 

 it, " hampered all in their own death-bringing shackles." 



However the extinction came about, it was thorough- 



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