66 BOMBAY DUCKS 
voices as they fly past the abode of the dead. Hard 
by, from behind a picturesque bamboo clump, ascends 
the blue smoke from a tiny hamlet. 
Some of the little naked village children are actually 
playing among the ruins of the tomb. It is an interest- 
ing sight this. Those children are the sons of the soil, 
they are little plebeians, descendants of the men who 
once cringed and cowered before him whose tomb 
is now a ruin, whose race is extinct, and whose very 
name has been forgotten. How are the mighty 
fallen ! 
Is not this a case of the survival of the unfit? Is it 
not a paradox that the race of puny, ill-fed men should 
have survived, while that of the warrior chieftain, 
superior in intellect and physique, should have become 
extinct? 
But look! two jackals are making their way out 
of the cover at the base of the mound. Timid creatures 
these, they look the picture of cowardice as they sneak 
along, the tail between the legs. Is this not another 
instance of the survival of the unfit? How is it that 
these poor fear-stricken jackals are a flourishing species, 
found all over India, while mighty animals, such as the 
elephant, the lion, the giraffe, and the tiger, are fast 
disappearing from off the face of the earth? The 
question may be extended. How comes it that rats, 
mice, moles, rabbits, hares, and the other small fry 
of the mammalian world hold their own in the struggle 
for existence, while the mammoth, the mastodon, the 
glyptodon, the giant sloth and the great pterodactyle 
reptiles have become extinct? What mean these para- 
