es, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an
inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one
beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of
the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the
Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and
before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene,
immeasurably longer than all the others put together. These three make
up in their sum the Tertiary period, which entire period can hardly have
occupied more time in its passage than a single division of the
Secondary, such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and
the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling
duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the
unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary
aeons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's mystic
head, 'Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The time we know affords us no
measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we
know not; and the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and more
inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes,
into its dimmest and earliest recesses.

These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one's head swim; let us
hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny bigness of our
earthly animals, living or extinct.

If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and terrestrial,
we shall soon see that we could bring together at the present moment a
very goodly collection of extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too,
each about as fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has
ever preceded it. Every age has its own _specialite_ in the way of
bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing
overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in
another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic
proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax
fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or
the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs
or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is
most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist
who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known
to us only