252 BIG ANIMALS 



But if you suppose, reader, that I am {,'oing to carry my 

 forbearance so far as to let you, too, off the remainder of 

 that geological disquisition, you are certainly very much mis- 

 taken. A discourse which would be quite unpardonable in 

 social intercourse may be freely admitted in the privacy of 

 print ; because, you see, wliile you can't easily tell a man 

 that his conversation bores you (though some people just 

 avoid doing so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut 

 up a book whenever you like, without the very faintest 

 or remotest risk of hurting the author's delicate suscep- 

 tibilities. 



The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like 

 the conventional sermon, into two heads — the precise 

 date of * geological times,' and the exact bigness of the 

 animals that lived in them. And I may as well begin by 

 announcing my general conclusion at the very outset ; 

 first, that ' those days ' never existed at all ; and, secondly, 

 that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet 

 are, on the whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any 

 previous contemporary fauna that ever lived at any one 

 time together upon its changeful surface. I know that to 

 announce this sad conclusion is to break down one more 

 universal and cherished belief ; everybody considers that 

 • geological animals ' were ever so much bigger than their 

 modern representatives ; but the interests of truth should 

 always be paramount, and, if the trade of an iconoclast is 

 a somewhat cruel one, it is at least a necessary lunction 

 in a world so ludicrously overstocked with popular delusions 

 as this erring planet. 



What, then, is the ordinary idea of * geological time ' 

 in the minds of people like my good friend who refused to 

 discuss with me the exact antiquity of the Atlantosaurian ? 

 They think of it all as immediate and contemporaneous, a 

 vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed for 



