252 THE BOOK OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 



being only three feet high, but the Giant Moa (Dinornis maximus) 

 attained a height of some eleven feet. These birds were quite 

 flightless and appear to have been extinguished by the Maoris, who 

 settled in New Zealand about the fourteenth century. 



It is claimed by evolutionists that birds have been derived from 

 a reptilian ancestry and have developed their characteristics by 

 natural selection. Sir E. Ray Lankester says: "It is now certain 

 that Reptiles similar to the Iguanodon were the stock from which 

 birds have been derived, the front limb having become probably 

 first a swimming flipper or paddle, and then later an organ for 

 beating the air and raising the creature out of the water for a brief 

 flight. From such a beginning came the feather-bearing wing of 

 modern birds." ^ The testimony of the rocks favours this declara- 

 tion. The Archseopteryx already described bears many reptilian 

 features, and seems to be a link between a reptilian ancestry and 

 more fully developed birds. 



THE AGE OF MAMMALS.— We now turn to the Tertiary or 

 Cainozoic Epoch, which was conspicuously the Age of Mammals. 

 Sir Archibald Geikie, in his Class Booh of Geology (page 366, 

 edition 1903), gives an excellent conception of the earth in Tertiary 

 time which I cannot do better than set down in his own words. 

 "The importance of this part of the geological chronicle may be 

 inferred from the following facts : During Tertiary time the sea- 

 bed was ridged up into land to such an extent as to give the con- 

 tinents nearly their existing area and contour. The crust of the 

 earth was upturned into great mountain ranges, and notably into 

 that long band of lofty ground stretching from the Pyrenees right 

 through the heart of Europe and Asia to Japan. Some portions 

 of the Tertiary sea-bed now form mountain peaks 16,000 feet or 

 more above the sea. The generally warm climate of the globe, 

 indicated by the world-wide diffusion of the same species of shells 

 in Paleozoic, and less conspicuously in Mesozoic times, now slowly 

 passed into the modern phase of graduated temperatures, from great 

 heat at the equator to extreme cold around the poles. At the be- 

 ginning of the Tertiary or Cainozoic periods, the climate was 

 mild even far within the Arctic Circle, but at their close, it became 

 so cold that snow and ice spread far southward over Europe and 

 North America. 



"The plants and animals of Tertiary time are strikingly modern 



' Extinct Animals, p. 202, 1909 Edition. 



