and his river billowing ran: And he felt
himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race.' There was the
ichthyosaurus, a fish-like marine lizard, familiar to us all from a
thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers,
his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The
ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in
a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement,
the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed
twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent
size for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the
two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen
feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the
ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock-snakes,
which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the
waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of
course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our
British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in length, and
carried weight not exceeding three tons; but, his rival Ceteosaurus
stood ten feet high, and measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout
to the end of his tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be
briefly described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as
one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing
at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an
assemblage of species which could very favourably compete with the whole
lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to
tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could easily give points
to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.

The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium
and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in livestock;
but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came
near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same period
could have held their own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and
buffaloes; but, taking the group as a group, I don't think there is any
reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of
this present age.

For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still
possess. We have the Indian and the Af