226 MOSTLY MAMMALS 
If such were really the case, we should indeed be living 
in an impoverished epoch of the world’s history; but if 
we take the term ‘‘present” in not too narrow a sense, 
and also bear in mind that Europe, and such other parts 
of the world as have been more or less thickly populated 
for untold ages, scarcely form a fair basis of comparison, 
it will be manifest that the idea in question is to a con- 
siderable extent due to misconceptions and inaccuracies of 
the nature of those referred to above. 
It is true that in certain portions of the world the 
larger forms of animal life disappeared at an epoch when 
man can scarcely be regarded as having taken a promi- 
nent part in their extermination ; a notable example of this 
kind being South America, where the huge ground-sloths, 
toxodons, and macrauchenias of the latter part of the 
Tertiary epoch disappeared with seeming suddenness in 
what is to us an unaccountable manner. The extermi- 
nation of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the 
hippopotamus from Europe, although partly, perhaps, 
attributable to climatic change, has not improbably been 
accelerated by man’s influence; and the same may be true 
with regard to some of the larger mammals of ancient 
India. 
In the latter country we have, however, still the Indian 
elephant, the great one-horned rhinoceros, and the wild 
buffalo, which, although not actually the largest repre- 
sentatives of their kind, are yet enormous animals. In 
Africa the presence of animals of large corporeal bulk is 
more noticeable. Although the extinct elephant of the 
Norfolk ‘“forest-bed” is stated to have been the biggest 
of its tribe, it is very doubtful if it was really larger 
than the living African elephant; and the so-called white 
rhinoceros, in the days of its abundance, was certainly not 
