the rhinoceros, and the buffalo must go.  But we are still a long way off from that final consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears highly probable that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever came out of it.  Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal of our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions, seems far more problematical.  The race is now no longer to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.  Brain counts for more than muscle, and mind has gained the final victory over mere matter.  Goliath of Gath has shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as in the fairy tales of old, it is cunning little Jack with his clever devices who wins the day against the heavy, clumsy, muddle-headed giants.  Nowadays it is our ‘Minotaurs’ and ‘Warriors’ that are the real leviathans and behemoths of the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens of the latter-day seas.  Instead of developing individually into huge proportions, the human race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires, which compete with one another by means of huge armaments, and invent mitrailleuses and torpedos of incredible ferocity for their mutual destruction.  The dragons of the prime that tare each other in their slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armour-plated turret-ships.  Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern seas of the secondary saurians.  Let us hope that some coming geologist of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the sunken ‘Captain,’ or the plated scales of the ‘Comte de Grasse,’ firmly embedded in the upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn deprecation at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.

FOSSIL FOOD

There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the idea of eating a fossil.  To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years (according to Dr. Croll’s minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty, they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the naturalists of Europe would have been ready gladly to pay the highest market price of best beefsteak.  Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off the skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left nothing but the tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of the new Natural History Museum at South Kensington.  But then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia, are not exactly fastidious about the nature of their meat diet.  Furthermore, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, presumably