CENOZOIC TUVIE — TERTIARY. 931 



ing or holding food, and jaws armed with long canines, they, too, needed 

 no abnormal growths for defense or attack. 



The larger Plant-eaters, who dared to face the Carnivores, at least wheo 

 escape was not easy, whose legs, while good for locomotion, were of no ser- 

 vice for prehension or attack^ ^ived themselves as battering-rams, with the 

 head as the striking end and the means also of tossing away or rending the 

 daring enemy. Under the necessities of their condition, the forehead and 

 nose grew horns, and a pair of teeth became elongated into tusks. As the 

 legs, besides, were of no service for gathering food, the nose, as well as the 

 elongated canines, was sometimes made to serve for grubbing ; and the nose 

 thus used became elongated, until the Tapir's nose could pull over a tree, 

 and the Elephant's serve as a long agile arm of great strength and wide 

 diversity of work. Such abnormal growths are characteristics of Herbivores 

 alone. The graceful Horse is one of the exceptions among Herbivorous 

 locomotors, for it finds its chief means of attack in its hind legs, and of 

 escape in its fleetness. 



Great degeneration also took place among the Mammals ; for before the 

 close of the Eocene there were Whales in the seas — the Zeuglodons. The 

 species is supposed, from its teeth and food, to be a degenerate flesh-eating 

 species, which, for escape, took to the water, where support from limbs 

 is not needed. In this supporting element the body became enormously 

 enlarged and multiplicate in its vertebral column, like the Sea-Saurians, 

 the length being increased from four or five feet to 70 feet, and the size of the 

 dorsal vertebrae to a diameter of a foot and a length of a foot and a half. 

 Its teeth remained few, 36 ; and the molars retained their two roots, but the 

 distinction between molars and premolars was lost. 



Further: in the Miocene, as -stated on page 912, Whales appeared of 

 greater degeneration along two or more lines : species appearing that were 

 multiplicate in teeth, and in the phalanges of some of the digits of the fore 

 limbs, as well as in vertebrae ; others that had teeth only in one jaw and all 

 single- rooted ; and still others that had no teeth, but only plates of whale- 

 bone with unravelled edges in a huge mouth to strain out small animals from 

 the sea-water for food. 



It may be supposed that these aquatic animals became urosthenic, like 

 Fishes, because sculling with the whole posterior part of the body was their 

 best mode of progression ; that the body became long and almost indefinite 

 in number of vertebrae, to secure greater force in the sculling organ; that 

 the hind limbs disappeared because useless ; and that, in one branch of the 

 tribe, the teeth began to disappear altogether when the smaller swarming life 

 of some parts of the ocean received into the mouth almost without effort, 

 began to satisfy appetite. It may also be presumed that the whale-bone 

 plates, over 350 in number, either side of the middle line, grew downward 

 from the palate just as soon as they were needed ; but the question, what 

 made them grow, remains, as in many like cases, unanswered. In the young 

 state these Whales have rudimentary teeth. The results Avere much like 



