A GIANT AMONG SEALS 227 
inferior in point of size to any of its extinct relatives. 
The giraffe, again, which in the Mount Elgon district is 
stated to tower to twenty feet, is much taller than any extinct 
quadruped yet known to us; and the hippopotamus falls 
but little short of its ancestors of the Pleistocene epoch. 
The elands, again, are by far the largest of antelopes 
known at any period of the earth’s history; and the 
ostrich, although not comparable with some of the New 
Zealand moas (which, by the way, were probably exter- 
minated only a few centuries ago by the Maoris), is yet 
the largest member of its own particular group. Again, 
no fossil ape is known which is anywhere in the running 
as compared with a full-grown male gorilla. It is, more- 
over, probable, despite the old-world legends of giants, 
that man at the present day is, on the whole, a taller and 
finer animal than he ever was before. 
Of course, there are certain cases where the animals of 
to-day cannot compare with some of their predecessors, 
and a case in point is afforded by the extinct atlas tor- 
toise of Northern India, which (although its size has 
been vastly exaggerated) far exceeded in bulk its living 
cousins of the Galapagos and Mascarenes. This, however, 
may perhaps be accounted for by the larger area of its 
habitat. 
Among the inhabitants of the ocean we shall find even 
more striking testimony as to the large bodily size (either 
absolute or relative) attained by many animals of the 
present day. Probably no mollusc was ever larger than 
the giant clam, whose valves measure a yard or more in 
length; and we have no evidence that the enormous cuttles 
and squids forming the food of the sperm-whale were 
ever rivalled in size during past epochs. The huge long- 
limbed crab of the Japanese seas, and the cocoanut crab 
