er of that geological
disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A discourse which
would be quite unpardonable in social intercourse may be freely admitted
in the privacy of print; because, you see, while you can't easily tell a
man that his conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing
so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book whenever you
like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of hurting the author's
delicate susceptibilities.

The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the
conventional sermon, into two heads--the precise date of 'geological
times,' and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I
may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very
outset; first, that 'those days' never existed at all; and, secondly,
that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet are, on the
whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary
fauna that ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful
surface. I know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down
one more universal and cherished belief; everybody considers that
'geological animals' were ever so much bigger than their modern
representatives; but the interests of truth should always be paramount,
and, if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at
least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with
popular delusions as this erring planet.

What, then, is the ordinary idea of 'geological time' in the minds of
people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact
antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and
contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed
for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa
hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the
tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs
and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris
Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of
the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the
great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a
picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a
thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old
times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid
Tave