14 The Queensland Naturalist. Vol. 2 
In New Zealand, where there were no mammals, the 
birds developed on remarkable lines. And so we read of 
nian}^ forms of flightless extinct moas, some of which were 
Oft. in height. In Australia also we have fossils of struthious 
birds, such as Genyornis. not lineally connected with the 
emu. Here again is evidence of what I should like to call 
radial evolution. 
Are we not too apt to judge the life of the past merely 
as a measure for the life of to-day ? So far as the record of 
palaeontology is unfolded, we see that in each age the poten- 
tialities of tile environment were realised to a full extent. 
The life of the past lived for its own time, as well as for the 
future. Groups of organisms now represented by a few 
surviving species once revelled in rich and varied life, and 
were dominant forms. Families once world-wide in range 
now only exist in isolated areas, and seem under sentence of 
extinction. To-day there are but few living forms of Ceph- 
alopods, but in Mesozoic times there are 5,000 species of 
Ammonites alone. The wealth of giant cryptogams in the 
Carboniferous period dwarfs the meagre forms of to-day, 
and we can And no adequate explanation for the extinction 
of some of these forms. 
The history of this planet, since it first reached a biotic 
stage, is the story of exuberant and triumphant life, indifferent 
to the fate of derelicts, adapting itself to extremes of 
conditions, seemingly striving sometimes to attain the 
impossible, achieving here and there the grotesque and the 
monstrous, here and there the beautiful and — so far as we 
can gauge these things by human standards— the useful and 
the good. The great pulsating stream of life has gone on, 
indomitable and ever expanding, but many of its branches 
resulted but in termini, marking the extinction of certain 
forms. These were the failures of protean nature. They 
were in some cases the adventurous colonists of life ; they 
had their day but failed to be potential for the future. The 
many processes of evolution exhibit wayward and chaotic 
wanderings in side-paths, with developments of weird and 
uncouth forms, which represent no intermediate stages. 
Looking back tlirough the record of earth’s changes, we find 
that whole races have come into being, and have been crushed 
out in the struggle. Monsters such as many of the specialised 
reptiles of Jurassic times came across the stage of life, and 
left but a bulk of bones — in some districts forming veritable 
Golgothas - memorialising the powers of life and death. 
And whilst there has been in many respects a general upward 
trend, whole orders of animals have come under the potent 
influence of what science calls degeneracy ; they have fallen 
from their high estate. 
