rn forms. We come at once into lands
and seas where the back-boned animals are the ruling beings. The
reptiles have shrunk to a few low forms,--the small lizards, the
crocodiles and alligators, the tortoises and turtles, and, as if to
mark more clearly the banishment of this group from their old empire,
the serpents, which are peculiarly degraded forms of reptiles which
have lost the legs they once had, came to be the commonest reptiles of
the earth.

The first mammals that have no pouches now appear. In earlier times,
the suck-giving animals all belonged to the group that contains our
opossums, kangaroos, etc. These creatures are much lower and feebler
than the mammals that have no pouches. Although they have probably
been on the earth two or three times as long as the higher mammals,
they have never attained any eminent success whatever; they cannot
endure cold climates; none of them are fitted for swimming as are the
seals and whales, or for flying as the bats, or for burrowing as the
moles; they are dull, weak things, which are not able to contend with
their stronger, better-organized, higher kindred. They seem not only
weak, but unable to fit themselves to many different kinds of
existence.

In the lower part of the Tertiary rocks, we find at once a great
variety of large beasts that gave suck to their young. It is likely
that these creatures had come into existence in a somewhat earlier
time in other lands, where we have not been able to study the fossils;
for to make their wonderful forms slowly, as we believe them to have
been made, would require a very long time. It is probable that during
the Cretaceous time, in some land where we have not yet had a chance
to study the rocks, these creatures grew to their varied forms, and
that in the beginning of the Tertiary time, they spread into the
regions where we find their bones.

Beginning with the Tertiary time, we find these lower kinsmen of man,
through whom man came to be. The mammals were marked by much greater
simplicity and likeness to each other than they now have. There were
probably no monkeys, no horses, no bulls, no sheep, no goats, no
seals, no whales, and no bats. All these animals had many-fingered
feet. There were no cloven feet like those of our bulls, and no solid
feet as our horses have. Their brains, which by their size give us a
general idea of the intelligence of the creature, are small; hence we
conclude that these early mammals were less in