rican elephant, the hippopotamus,
the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison,
the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are
generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and
most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and
ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment
of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of
fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now
sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the
camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New
Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is
more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one
hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American
Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our
bottleheads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four,
our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True
fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but some of
the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans.
The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity,
would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for the best
bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I would back our
modern carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus
that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for rhinodon, a gigantic shark of
the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a length of fifty
feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will stake my reputation
upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great
saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous
marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great
snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and
sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any
other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own for
colossal forms of animal life.

Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big
animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about
everything having been so very much bigger 'in those days' have become
extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological
point of view, quite re