idently to claim for our own existing human period
as fine a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on this
planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if you are going to
lump all the extinct monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified
fauna, regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you; I
will candidly admit that there were more great men in all previous
generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from Agamemnon to
Wellington, than there are now existing in this last quarter of our
really very respectable nineteenth century. But if you compare honestly
age with age, one at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from
there being any falling off in the average bigness of things generally
in these latter days, there are more big things now living than there
ever were in any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the
'recent' period.

I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there
have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our
earth--the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type,
and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial
tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,'
because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe
that any one age has much surpassed another in the general size of its
fauna, since the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get
geological evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular
deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid
down under conditions unfavourable to the preservation of the remains of
large species. For example, the sediment now being accumulated at the
bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature
much larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big species
there swimming; and yet that fact does not negative the existence in
other places of whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami.
Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare
our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene times, we
shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the severest competition
that lies within our power under the actual circumstances.

In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very big
reptiles. 'A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth: For
him did his high sun flame