A GIANT AMONG SEALS 
Few generalisations have taken a firmer hold of the 
popular imagination than the notion that the animals of 
to-day bear no sort of comparison with their predecessors 
of the past in respect of bodily size, and that, so far as 
the giants of the animal kingdom are concerned, we are 
living in a dwarfed and impoverished world. Like most 
popular conceptions, this idea contains a considerable 
element of truth mingled with a large amount of mis- 
conception. In the first place, there is no accurate defi- 
nition of what is meant by “the past.” If it mean only 
those epochs of the earth’s history previous to the advent 
of man, it is unquestionably inaccurate. If, on the other 
hand, it also embrace the prehistoric portion of man’s 
sojourn on the globe, it has scarcely a claim to be regarded 
as a fair or accurate statement of the true state of the 
case, seeing that the extermination of a very considerable 
percentage of the large animals of the epoch in question 
has been the work of man himself—a work, unhappily, 
which is still proceeding apace. 
But, in addition to this, the animals of one geological 
epoch are very frequently confounded with those of another, 
so that dinosaurs and mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesio- 
saurs, mastodons and mammoths, and glyptodons and 
ground-sloths are often spoken of as if contemporaries and 
inhabitants of the same country. 
225 15 
