by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' and 'Challengers,'
but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will
doubtless stand aghast at the huge skeletons of our whales and our
razorbacks, and will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in
the exact words of my friend at South Kensington, 'Things used all to be
so very big in those days, usedn't they?'

Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans and of
'geological' animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the Western
American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very largest
creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire
length is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no complete
skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature he appears to have
stood some thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a
very big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or
two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British
Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height and
size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good length of
seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to eighty, ninety, and
even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly entitled to say that we have at
least one species of animal now living which, occasionally at any rate,
equals in size the very biggest and most colossal form known
inferentially to geological science. Indeed when we consider the
extraordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as
compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge
Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a
decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic
Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, _in propria persona_. I
doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur
could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a full-grown family
razor-back whale. The mental picture of these unwieldy monsters hopping
casually about, like Alice's Gryphon in Tenniel's famous sketch, or
like that still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be
left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in
the details for himself as well as he is able.

If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens (always
an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of our contemporary
fauna, I venture conf