CHAPTER XXXV 



COMIC ANIMALS IN ART AND NATURE 



CARICATURE of animals seems to grow in favour 

 among the readers of comic papers, and popular 

 natural history has extended the limits of what was 

 always a favourite subject. Mr. E. T. Reed has for 

 some time been able to amuse the subscribers to Punch 

 by a series of humorous drawings, in which the main 

 figures are caricatures of extinct monsters, as restored 

 by Figuier and others caricatures of palaeontology, 

 which would have been too remote from common 

 knowledge to amuse had they been drawn twenty 

 years ago. As it is, Mr. Reed makes his monsters 

 much more alive, scaly, knobby, and squirmy, than 

 the best illustrators of scientific books. But they are 

 for the most part studies in grotesque. The creatures 

 hardly admit of caricature. The humour lies mostly 

 in the setting of the piece, in the contrast between 

 the absorption of the prehistoric men in their sports 

 and games, and the practical interest which the pre- 

 historic monsters as cool spectators take in their little 

 game, which is to secure and eat such of the players 

 as they may select. The fact that few, if any, of the 

 monsters represented were co-existent with primeval 



man does not in the least detract from the joke. 



259 



