EVIDENCE FROM ARRANGEMENT OF HAIR 45 



yet occurred, as, in the Great War, Italy was not at one period at 

 open war with Germany. 



Between the opposing forces in our small battle-field of the 

 hairy coat there have been waged battles to which those of Mukden, 

 Verdun, the Somme and Arras, are not to be compared in point of 

 time. They are but as one day to a thousand years. On one side of 

 the conflict in our present chosen field the ancient primitive type of 

 the lemur has remained entrenched for some millions of years, 

 until there arose new forces in its descendants on the other side 

 and this changed the war of positions into one of movement. It 

 was indeed " a contemptible little army " which came forward to 

 oppose the ancient barbarian forces of the lemur, long prepared 

 and organised, and these new armies fought under the banner, 

 Habit. In the slowly -formed patterns in many types of mammals 

 we have records of the treaties made after these long struggles and 

 the rectifications of frontier which became necessary. The critic 

 may call these " battles of kites and crows," and ask What war 

 correspondents were allowed to describe them ; but a battle, 

 whether great or small, long or short, is important to the parties 

 concerned, and it is open to us to " reconstruct " the facts of the 

 battle as do the historians on their part, for example, Sir James 

 Ramsay the battle of Agincourt — with tolerable verisimilitude. 

 But in science, especially geological science, the process of recon- 

 struction is much more ambitious and bold than any that is here 

 attempted. Who has not been fascinated, if he has read Sir E. 

 Ray Lankester's work on Extinct Animals, by the skill and daring 

 with which he conveys to us a vivid idea of the form and mode of 

 life, with scanty data, of the extinct Moa of New Zealand, the great 

 Pterodactyle, Pteranodon, or the Diprotodon of Owen — " the 

 probable appearance in life " of these uncanny but very real 

 inhabitants of the earth in days long past. How skilfully did Owen 

 from a piece of bone seven inches long, sent to him by a gentleman 

 in New Zealand sixty years ago, pronounce it to be a part of the 

 thign-bone of a bird like an ostrich, and then after a few years had 

 passed, confirmed it by more bones of the skeleton, till the large 

 Moa, extinguished 600 or 700 years ago by the Maoris, lived again 

 before us — an historical personage ; or how by the examination of 

 the skull and most of its skeleton the giant marsupial from Australia, 

 Diprotodon, was resuscitated and admired ; or again, how from the 

 bones of the arms, shoulder-girdle and fingers was built up the 

 strange body of Pteranodon, the great flying dragon. All of which 

 is the legitimate and approved business of biologists and palaeon- 

 tologists, and this digression is made here to show that my line of 



