42 Reviews—Hutchinson’s Hxtinct Monsters. 
pursuits of his daily life, and beyond his capacities for loving 
and hating, is that of the embodiment of the wonderful and the 
mysterious. Nature in all her varied forms and moods speaks to 
the mind of man, as the nurse or parent speaks to the little child, 
and all her tales are full of strange and weird pictures. 
The myths and traditions of all nations teem with marvellous 
accounts of monsters, grotesque or terrible, and it would seem as if 
those peoples who inhabited sea-coasts, or went down to the sea in 
ships, as the old Vikings and Norsemen used to do, or the ancient 
Greeks and more modern Chinese, always had the largest assortment 
of bogies of all sorts in stock. A glance at the deities of Egypt and 
of Ind, or at the pictured dragons of Japan, at the Centaurs, Harpies, 
Hydras, Chimeras, and Tritons of the Greeks, will show how the 
human mind has always delighted to revel in imaginary monsters, 
many of which were doubtless discovered by the priests of their 
various religions to be extremely useful to overawe and strike terror 
into the minds of the ignorant and superstitious masses. 
It seems strange that whilst the active imagination of man in past 
ages was busy everywhere in inventing all kinds of marvellous and 
uncanny creatures, and often laboured hard to depict them graphic- 
ally enough in stone, or bronze, or terra-cotta, there should have 
existed, tens of thousands of years before, in Europe, Africa, and 
America, and no doubt in Asia also, beasts more strange than ever 
the mind of man had conceived in his wildest moments of delirium 
or poetic fancy. 
Of some of these once-living monsters the author of the presen 
little work has ventured to give us a pictorial notion, assisted by his 
artist Mr. J. Smit and others; nor has his effort been wanting in 
success, and even if, in some cases the author and artist seem to 
have been less happy in making the dry bones live again, we must 
make due allowance for the many difficulties by which their self- 
imposed task has been surrounded. Imagine the dismay of a 
fashionable West-end tailor who should be ordered to outfit a 
Hottentot in elegant evening dress; or still more, to cut out garments 
for a gorilla! What wonder then if the combined efforts of author 
and artist have, in some instances, failed to make the artificial hides 
they have constructed fit gracefully on such incongruous beasts as 
Triceratops or Stegosaurus, or to induce Brontosaurus gracefully to 
tread the earth once more. 
The pictures in Mr. Hutchinson’s book,—which by the way do 
not include anything like all the monsters which we know almost 
completely at the present day,—have impressed upon us, more than 
any other work, the enormous advances which paleontological and 
geological discoveries have made in the past 35 years. 
Let us for a moment recall the six crowded galleries of the old 
British Museum at Bloomsbury, into which were compressed not 
only all the then known fossil remains in the largest collection in 
this country both of Vertebrata and Invertebrata, but also the finest 
Mineralogical collection in the world, with the largest series of 
Meteorites preserved in any one Museum. 
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