MONSTROSITIES 309 



supposed that they belonged only to the recent epoch, where they 

 were the result of a long series of formative changes.' 



Now I have always thought that composite flowers may have 

 originated from some ancestral monstrosity — a disc-like fascica- 

 tion of some plant of the nature of Pimelea, Ixora, Bouvardia 

 Valeriana, Centranthus, and others,^ and here is a helianthoid mass 

 of flowers appearing all of a sudden in the Cretaceous flora — with- 

 out any apparent predecessors to explain its gradual evolution ! 

 May it not have been the development of a monstrous form 

 appearing suddenly like the composite-like Myosotis (The Jewel) 

 mentioned before, which came out of the ordinary Myosotis with a 

 scorpioid inflorescence ? 



Professor Nicholson said that the most rational way to account 

 for this new creation, so to speak, is to suppose that in the Pacific 

 Ocean there was a continent which sank, slowly it may be, and is 

 now no longer traceable, so that the animals which had been 

 there evolved had time to migrate in two directions, to what we 

 now call the Old and the New Worlds. Their predecessors are 

 now under the sea, and therefore this theory, unless that continent 

 should come up again, is not likely to be confirmed. 



These new quadrupeds, although specialised, had still a general- 

 ised structure, and were all five-digited in hand and foot. In the 

 Early Tertiary, as a rule, they had that number of digits, and then a 

 diminution in their number commenced, such as in the Hippo- 

 potamus, the Rhinoceros, the Ruminants, and finally the Horse, 

 which has only one digit. Concurrently with the reduction of digits 

 there occurred a reduction in the number of teeth from forty-four 

 to thirty-two in Man, the latter being now reduced to twenty-eight. 



There was another feature connected with these new quad- 



^ The reader should note that the disposition of the florets of the disc of several com- 

 posite flowers is spiral, as it often is on an ordinary raceme. 



