August i, 1885.] The Australasian Scientific Magazine. 
3 
EXTINCT ANIMALS 
BY 
T. S. BULMER, M.D., Etc. 
I shall not consider the earth as a dead animal, vegetation or trees as the 
hair on its back, the mountains as its back-bone, the rivers as blood-vessels, 
the mighty ocean as its heart, the minerals as the marrow of its bones, 
earthquakes as a feverish excitement of its system, or volcanoes as the 
bilious eructations of a disordered stomach ; nor even will I consider our- 
selves as the barnacles attached to a large whale; but rather as constituents 
of the churchyard of nature, which contains, in stratified order, the remains 
of all our brother animals, which have made their exit for the last 500 
million years. 
Let us now descend into the bowels of the earth, examine its shelves, 
what do we see? Coffins and bodies placed in identical position, according 
to the age and period in which they expired. There before our visual orb 
will be seen our brother animals of the fifth epoch, not akin to any of the 
present era, nor yet can we trace any kith or kinship with them except as 
regards their skeleton forms. 
We further view their death-beds, and find no disturbance of their funeral 
shrouds, but rather regularly arranged earthly coverlets with all the older 
scions, superimposed above each other, as if their lineage and rank were to 
be examined into at some future aions of time. 
Taking a section of a few hundred feet of the burial ground, at various 
heights, you will find one class of animals, Ammonites for instance, all 
disposed in their particular zone, or belt of limestone or clay. Viewing the 
question, we cannot but ask, have all these forms, though in broken stages 
and with some irregularities and erring advance, been subject to any 
continuous law of growth or change ? 
If our education had been purely scientific, and entirely free from other 
hindrances and delusions, acting as foreign bodies in the domains of science, 
we should never have allowed the anthromorphism of false error to have 
crept in, and regard the various strata as a series of carpenters’ benches for 
the manufacture and renewing of new species, out of all relation to the old 
material, or, in other words, working out the old man with new propen- 
sities. 
Animals have existed of which no traces are now found, there must then 
have been a second creation ; or transformation has gone on. 
If Noah, in his ark, had species of all kinds with him, and they are the 
ancestors of all our present race of animals, what about the extinct classes 
which never coincide, though of the same family, with our present race of 
animals ? 
