American Big Game in its Haunts 



perceived that they were essentially of the same 

 stock and ancestral to our modern types. There 

 were little camels scarcely more than twelve inches 

 high, little taller than cotton-tail rabbits and 

 smaller than the jackass rabbits; horses 15 inches 

 high, scarcely larger than, and very similar in 

 build to, the little English coursing hound known 

 as the whippet ; it is not improbable that we shall 

 find the miniature deer; there certainly existed 

 ancestral wolves and foxes of similarly small pro- 

 portions. You have all read your Darwin care- 

 fully enough to know that neither camels, horses, 

 nor deer would have evolved as they did except 

 for the stimulus given to their limb and speed de- 

 velopment by the contemporaneous evolution of 

 their enemies in the dog family. 



THE MIDDLE STAGE OF EVOLUTION. 



A million and a half years later these same ani- 

 mals had attained a very considerable size; the 

 western country had become transformed by the 

 elevation of the plateaux into dry, grass-bearing 

 uplands, where both horses and deer of peculiarly 

 American types were grazing. We have recently 

 secured some fresh light on the evolution of the 

 American deer. Besides the Palaomeryx, which 

 may be related to the true American deer Odocoi 



354 



