254 BIG ANIMALS 



from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events nar- 

 rated in this evening's Pall Mall, is less than a second, less 

 than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can 

 possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the 

 temples of Karnak and the New Law Courts would bo 

 absolutely contemporaneous ; he has no means by which 

 he could discriminate in date between a scarabaeus of 

 Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of 

 her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent 

 authorities have shown good grounds for believing that the 

 Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years ago ; and every- 

 thing that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from 

 the geological point of view, described as ' recent.' A shell 

 embedded in a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years 

 ago, while short and swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt un- 

 disturbed in Britain, ages before the irruption of the 

 * Ancient Britons ' of our inadequate school-books, is, in 

 the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely 

 modern. 



But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, 

 that eighty thousand years which coincides in part with the 

 fraction of a single swing of the cosmical pendulum, there 

 lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and years, 

 and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an in- 

 conceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves 

 slowly, one beyond the other, to- our aching vision in the 

 half-deciphered pages of the geological record. Before the 

 Glacial Epoch there comes the Pliocene, immeasurably 

 longer than the whole expanse of recent time ; and before 

 that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene, 

 immeasurably longer than all the others put together. 

 These three make up in their sum the Tertiary period, 

 which entire period can hardly have occupied more time 

 in its passage than a single division of the Secondary, 



