cent.

For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is
more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when
he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the
familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the
mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was
hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still
living--at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in
Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the
wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its
fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of
geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off
the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his neighbour, the mastodon.
That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is
true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he
survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene--our day before
yesterday--and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint
weapons of the Abbe Bourgeois' Miocene men. The period that separates
him from our own day is as nothing compared with the vast and
immeasurable interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians
of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with human
chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as Beau Brummel stands
to the modern masher, while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and
Assyrian warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.

Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that enormous bird who
was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the antelope; a monstrous emu,
as far surpassing the ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all
the other fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in the
strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen
Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little
time before the first white settlements in the great southern
archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live down to
the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments are
still discovered, with the ashes of the fireplace even now unscattered,
and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic bird lying in the very spot
where the natives left them after their destructive feasts. So, too,
with the big sharks. Our mo