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CHARLES 13. WARRING, M.A V PH.D., ON 



beds there were undoubted small mammals, and so from that period 

 we have evidence of mammalian life, and the surviving reptiles were 

 not such huge creatures as in the earlier periods. 



When it is said that the largest of living animals had disappeared, 

 the author had forgotten the existence of the great " Eight-whale," 

 which is a mammal, 80 to 120 feet in length, and the largest of all 

 animals that ever lived upon the surface or in the waters of the 

 globe. The whales are larger than any of the great reptiles, the 

 Dinosauria. So large a creature could not have supported existence 

 upon the land ; even had its limbs served, it would be absolutely 

 impossible for purposes of locomotion upon dry ground, from its 

 vast bulk. It could only move in the water, in which the more, 

 resisting medium of that fluid enabled it to support its bulk and 

 live. The land reptiles were limited as to size. Even the largest 

 of them, the Brontosaurus (perhaps 70 feet in length), one of which is 

 is about to be set up by Mr. Andrew Carnegie in the Natural 

 History Museum this year, is supposed to be an animal which 

 walked under tvater and put its head out to breathe, and fed upon the 

 aquatic plants growing at the bottom of the rivers or lakes. This- 

 has only been suggested by Professor Cope, and therefore is not put 

 forward as a well-ascertained fact in science. 



May I be permitted to read these few lines to you from 

 Huxley : "If there be any result which has come more clearly out 

 of geological investigation than another, it is that the vast series of 

 extinct animals and plants is not divisible into distinct groups by 

 any sharply-marked boundaries. There are no great gaps between 

 epochs and formations, no successive periods marked by the 

 appearance of plants and animals en masse. Every year adds to 

 the list of links between what the older geologists supposed to be 

 entirely separate epochs. Witness the Crags linking the Drift 

 with Older Tertiaries ; the Maestricht beds linking the Tertiaries 

 with the Chalk ; the St. Cassian beds exhibiting a mixed fauna of 

 mesozoic and palaeozoic types in rocks of an epoch once supposed 

 to be eminently poor in life ; witness, lastly, the incessant disputes 

 as to whether a given stratum shall be reckoned Devonian or 

 Carboniferous, Silurian or Devonian, Cambrian or Silurian."' 

 (Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 243), [written before 1870, soon after the 

 appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species\ This was written by 

 Huxley before 1870, so that the author has overlooked an important 



