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From them come most of the petrified remains of that great army of extinct reptiles and mammals the three-toed horse, the sabre-toothed tiger, the brontosaurus, the fin-backed lizard, the imperial mammoth, the various dinosaurs, some of them gigantic in form and fearful in aspect that of late years have appeared in our museums and that throw so much light upon the history of the animal life of the globe.
Except for the sound of the water at the bow, we sailed for five or ten minutes in perfect silence. My eyes half closed and my head fell forward as I sat in the cockpit. "Well, I'd go below, and turn in," said Mr. Daddles, "but I don't know about facing that sabre-toothed tiger down there. We made a great mistake, boys, in not slitting his weasand the first time we saw him.
The foreground of the picture would have been filled by the rhinoceros and mammoth, the great herds of ruminants, the sabre-toothed lion and the big bears. Then presently the observer would have noted a peculiar increasing handiness about the obscurer type, an unwonted intelligence growing behind its eyes.
Altogether, early man was a miserable creature who lived in a world of fright and hunger, who was surrounded by a thousand enemies and who was for ever haunted by the vision of friends and relatives who had been eaten up by wolves and bears and the terrible sabre-toothed tiger. Of the earliest history of this man we know nothing. He had no tools and he built no homes.
There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which had attained their development in the fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses, tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed.
But there's a swamp not far behind our camp, and it's a shame to call the things that come from that swamp, mosquitoes they are more like flying tigers!" "I suppose the old sabre-toothed tiger, of our prehistoric days, was no more savage than these swamp fly-by-nights," Chet laughed. "Don't you have any other visitors over yonder?" Laura asked. "Oh, say! we had some this morning.
As a matter of fact, the mammoth has gone, the woolly rhinoceros of Northern Europe has gone, the sabre-toothed tiger prowls no more. Even wolves have disappeared, and the mosquito is still flourishing in his millions and billions. We have only just learned that it is he who gives us malaria, that it is he who spreads yellow fever and undoubtedly many other diseases.
True cats of the genus Felis were in existence before the close of the Miocene, and yet earlier related forms are known. Throughout the greater part of the Tertiary the remarkable type known as sabre-toothed cats were numerous and widely spread, and in South America they even lasted so far into the Pleistocene that it is probably true that they existed side by side with man.
Whether they date from our driving back by the polar ice-sheet, together with our titanic Big Game, the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the sabre-toothed tiger, from our hunting-grounds in Siberia and Norway, or from recollections of hunting parties pushing north from our tropical birth-lands, and getting trapped and stormbound by the advance of the strange giant, Winter, certain it is that our subconsciousness is full of ancestral memories which send a shiver through our very marrow at the mere mention of "cold" or "sleet" or "wintry blasts."
The animals contemporary with these primeval men were the mammoth, species of rhinoceros and hippopotamus, the "sabre-toothed" lion, the cave-bear, the reindeer, besides oxen, horses, and other still surviving forms. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, and in the other the Southern.
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