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The cranium, or brain-case of bone, is relatively larger than the "face," and it bulges upward so as to lie no longer behind the latter as it does in the lower mammalia. In consequence of this cranial enlargement, the face and eyes are swung downward, as it were, so that the line of vision is not straight ahead, but depressed below the horizontal.
In the vegetable kingdom, for example, the life-force might commence its career by occupying grasses or mosses and end it by ensouling magnificent forest trees. In the animal kingdom it might commence with mosquitoes or with animalculæ, and might end with the finest specimens of the mammalia.
About twenty feet below the "Cinder-bed" is a stratum two or three inches thick, in which fossil mammalia presently to be mentioned occur, and beneath this a thin band of greenish shales, with marine shells and impressions of leaves like those of a large Zostera, forming the base of the Middle Purbeck.
If the three localities where the most ancient mammalia have been found Purbeck, Stonesfield, and Stuttgart had belonged all of them to formations of the same age, we might well have imagined so limited an area to have been peopled exclusively with pouched quadrupeds, just as Australia now is, while other parts of the globe were inhabited by placentals, for Australia now supports one hundred and sixty species of marsupials, while the rest of the continents and islands are tenanted by about seventeen hundred species of mammalia, of which only forty-six are marsupial, namely, the opossums of North and South America.
If we suppose the mammalia to be more sensitive than are the inferior classes of the vertebrata, to every fluctuation in the surrounding conditions, whether of the animate or inanimate world, it would follow that they would oftener be called upon to adapt themselves by variation to new conditions, or if unable to do so, to give place to other types.
This is the more valuable in a country where the thick-skinned and leather-yielding mammalia are almost unknown. "Slaying the tapir is no easy matter. The creature is shy; and, having the advantage of the watery clement, is often enabled to dive beyond the reach of pursuit, and thus escape by concealing itself.
I thought I might just as well describe my pet in order to know it order, vertebrate; division, quadruped; class, mammalia; genus, felinus; species, cat; individual, Tabby. But as I got deeper into the subject, I became more interested, and the beauty of the language delighted me. I often amused myself by reading Latin passages, picking up words I understood and trying to make sense.
In all the divisions of animated nature there are ant-destroyers ant-eaters! To begin with the mammalia, man himself feeds upon them for there are tribes of Indians in South America, the principal part of whose food consists of dried termites, which they bake into a kind of "paste!"
It may be observed, although no specimens of so high a class of animals as mammalia are found earlier, such may nevertheless have existed: the defect may be in our not having found them; but, other things considered, the probability is that heretofore there were no mammifers.
The highest development of animal life he has seen in the MAMMALIA SALOON, all the animals of which produce their young alive and suckle them; the order of life immediately below the mammalia, he has examined in the marvellous varieties of birds arranged in the NORTHERN GALLERY; then he turned to the west, and examined the third order of animal life in the REPTILES; then the fourth order represented by FISH; and so on till he watched the simpler forms of life in the STAR-FISH and the SPONGE.
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