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CHAELES B. WARRING, M.A PH.D., ON 



scarcely at all changed. They are world-wide in distribution, and 

 still enjoy the coal-cellar as they did the Coal-period. There is also 

 a form of king-crab which has survived, but little changed, 

 from that time. Another case of survival is that of the scorpions, 

 which appeared first in the Upper Silurian of Lanarkshire, also in 

 the United States of America, and in the Island of Gotland. 

 These scorpions may have undergone some modification, but they 

 possessed tracheae ; they breathed the air as insects breathe it 

 nowadays. They were probably not aquatic scorpions, but true 

 terrestrial dwellers, and the family has continued to live down to 

 the present day. We notice also that in proportion to their great 

 antiquity in time, so is their wide geographical distribution now. 

 In all the warmer parts of the world we find scorpions living upon 

 dry land. It shows what an enormous vitality these creatures 

 must have enjoyed, which enabled them to change their habitat 

 with the changed condition of land and soil, and still live on 

 unaltered through such vast periods of geological time. 



I must emphatically enter my protest against the theory of 

 animals living either in the air or on the land without a proper 

 supply of oxygen and a minimum of carbonic acid gas, and also that 

 the waters of the rivers, lakes, and the sea must have been in a 

 similar habitable state. I cannot imagine their being so full of 

 carbonate of lime as to form a veritable peas-pudding in which the 

 animals must swim and aerate their blood. 



With regard to the extermination of the larger animals, I am 

 afraid that the author has gone astray there also. Of course every- 

 one who has treated the subject — and I may mention particularly 

 the name of the illustrious Professor, Sir Kichard Owen, who 

 pointed out long years ago, that in all times of drought, or flood, or 

 fires, or other troubles on the land, it is always the larger animals 

 that are the first to be exterminated, because they have the greatest 

 difficulty to maintain the struggle for life. They are bound to be 

 killed off". In times of drought they cannot get enough water or 

 food, and the smaller animals either escape by burrowing, or by 

 getting up a tree in a flood, or on high ground, whereas the large 

 animals are carried away and drowned. So when the author says 

 that the large animals ought (according to the law of the selection 

 of the most suitable) to have escaped, his statement is not borne out 

 by testimony and observation. It is the larger animals that most 



