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These are often adjacent to the existing coasts sometimes, however, they are far inland, in certain instances as far as fifty miles. Their contents and position indicate for them a date posterior to that of the great extinct mammals, but prior to the domesticated. Some of these, it is said, cannot be less than one hundred thousand years old.
For Big-Tooth also had an other-self, and when he slept that other-self dreamed back into the past, back to the winged reptiles and the clash and the onset of dragons, and beyond that to the scurrying, rodent-like life of the tiny mammals, and far remoter still, to the shore-slime of the primeval sea. I cannot, I dare not, say more. It is all too vague and complicated and awful.
The origin of the nose and the upper lip from two lateral and originally separate halves can be clearly seen. Nose and upper lip are large in proportion to the rest of the face, and especially to the lower lip. The double nose has now acquired the characteristic form that man shares with the other mammals.
Comparative anatomy shows us to-day, in the series of the double-nosed Vertebrates, from the fishes up to man, all the different stages in the development of the nose, which the advanced olfactory organ of the higher mammals has passed through at various periods in the course of its phylogeny.
This need takes a higher development and attains a more beautiful expression in mammals, especially amidst their young, and still more among the birds; but it pervades all Nature, and has been fully observed by the best naturalists, including Pierre Huber, even amongst the ants, and it is evidently the same instinct which brings together the big columns of butterflies which have been referred to already.
Another tooth was found in Gray's Inn Lane. The mammoth was evidently not confined to the present region of clubland. Besides these European and African groups of animals, a third class ranged the London plains, probably at a greater height and in a still colder temperature than the large grass-eating mammals mentioned.
Taking all these peculiarities of the Amniotes together, it is impossible to doubt that all the animals of this group all reptiles, birds, and mammals have a common origin, and form a single blood-related stem. Our own race belongs to this stem.
The mammals of the latest tertiary epoch in the Old and New Worlds belong to the same genera, or family groups, as those which now inhabit the same great geographical area. The crocodilian reptiles which existed in the earliest secondary epoch were similar in general structure to those now living, but exhibit slight differences in their vertebrae, nasal passages, and one or two other points.
To the argument that the vertebrate fauna of the Palæozoic period, consisting, so far as we know, entirely of Fishes, was less heterogeneous than the modern vertebrate fauna, which includes Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals, of multitudinous genera, it may be replied, as before, that estuary deposits of the Palæozoic period, could we find them, might contain other orders of vertebrata.
Where the native seed still exists, by long labor and travail, thorough protection and a mighty long close season, it can be encouraged to breed back and return; but it is an evolution that can not be hurried in the least. Protect Nature, and leave the rest to her. With mammals, the case is different. It is possible to restock depleted areas, provided Time is recognized as a dominant factor.
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