DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES. 118 
“The earth was our empire, the realm of the aquatic birds in the 
Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters. 
An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron 
then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor 
pursue; the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on 
every side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs, 
winged fish, infested the uncertain limits of the two elements. What 
would ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-born of the world? 
The Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged 
against the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the 
bird, attaining the dimensions of an Anak, shrunk not from battle 
with the giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these 
events, God’s grand record narrates them in the depths of the earth, 
where she deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters 
exterminated by us, and we who have exterminated them. 
“Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human 
Hercules. What had his club availed against the plesiosaurus? Who 
would have met, face to face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of 
flight was absolutely needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the 
loftiest height bore downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an 
eagle twenty feet in stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, 
the implacable hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the 
water, and in the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless 
hostility. 
“Man had perished a hundred times. Through our agency man 
became possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished 
that these awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the 
conquerors, wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a 
feeble Perseus, a pale and lustreless memory of our heroic 
times ? 
“Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by 
our very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division 
of the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the 
waters, we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests 
8 
