ORIGIN OF THE RAT-TOOTHED GOAT 157 



square-mouthed African rhinoceros has none at all ! This 

 helps us, as a parallel, to understand " the strange case " 

 of Myotragus. But, of course, the rhinoceroses are a 

 distinct line of animal descent — remote from Ruminants. 

 They are (like horses and tapirs) odd-toed hoofed-beasts — 

 not even-toed ones, as are pigs, camels, and Ruminants. 



On first considering the question of the origin of the 

 rat-goat of Majorca, some naturalists will, no doubt, be 

 tempted to suggest that it is a case of a sudden " sport," 

 a " mutation " as they now call it, and not a result of 

 gradual slowly developed reduction of the now lost teeth 

 and correspondingly gradual enlargement of the two 

 middle ones, taking many thousand generations to bring 

 about. The fact that the rat-goat is found on an island 

 cut off from competition with other animals will favour this 

 view. On the other hand, there is the important and 

 really remarkable fact that familiar as man has been for 

 ages with Ruminants of many kinds — such as sheep, goats, 

 cattle, deer — there is absolutely no case on record of an 

 " oddity " or " monstrosity " resembling the rat-goat's con- 

 dition occurring in the teeth of any of the hundreds of 

 thousands of these animals killed and eaten by man, and 

 therefore closely examined. Professor Bateson, who a few 

 years ago ransacked the museums of Europe for instances 

 of "discontinuous variation," or "sports," and wrote a 

 valuable book on the subject, did not discover any example 

 of the kind. Apart from the view, which is very generally 

 held, that such sudden " mutations " as " rat-teeth in a 

 ruminant " are — even should they occur — not perpetuated, 

 we are not really in any way driven to suppose that the 

 rat-goat of Majorca originated in that island. It is true 

 that we know nothing like it in the Pliocene and Miocene 

 of the Mediterranean region which could have been its 

 immediate ancestor. But probably the ancestors of the 



