A GIANT AMONG SEALS 



Few generalisations have taken a firmer hold of the 

 popular imagination than the notion that the animals of 

 to-day bear no sort of comparison with their predecessors 

 of the past in respect of bodily size, and that, so far as 

 the giants of the animal kingdom are concerned, we are 

 living in a dwarfed and impoverished world. Like most 

 popular conceptions, this idea contains a considerable 

 element of truth mingled with a large amount of mis- 

 conception. In the first place, there is no accurate defi- 

 nition of what is meant by " the past." If it mean only 

 those epochs of the earth's history previous to the advent 

 of man, it is unquestionably inaccurate. If, on the other 

 hand, it also embrace the prehistoric portion of man's 

 sojourn on the globe, it has scarcely a claim to be regarded 

 as a fair or accurate statement of the true state of the 

 case, seeing that the extermination of a very considerable 

 percentage of the large animals of the epoch in question 

 has been the work of man himself — a work, unhappily, 

 which is still proceeding apace. 



But, in addition to this, the animals of one geological 

 epoch are very frequently confounded with those of another, 

 so that dinosaurs and mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesio- 

 saurs, mastodons and mammoths, and glyptodons and 

 ground-sloths are often spoken of as if contemporaries and 



inhabitants of the same country. 



225 IS 



