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Updated: June 5, 2025
Changes in the distribution of land and water and in the nature of the land-surface, the coming of powerful carnivores, and other agencies which we have seen, have had their share in the onward impulsion of life, but the most drastic agency seems to have been the supervention of cold. The higher types of both animals and plants appear plainly in response to a lowering of temperature.
Even to an uncritical eye, the differences between ungulates and carnivores of to-day are many and obvious, but as we trace them back into the past we follow on converging lines, and in our search for the prototypes of the carnivora we are led to the Creodonta, contemporary with Condylarthra, which we have seen giving origin to hoofed beasts, but outlasting them into the succeeding age.
A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil of peoples passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray's rhythmic death of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller's court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold this devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!
The regularity and evenness of the dentition of the 'Anoplotherium', as contrasted with that of existing Artiodactyles, and the assumed nearer approach of the dentition of certain ancient Carnivores to the typical arrangement, have also been cited as exemplifications of a law of progressive development, but I know of no other cases based on positive evidence which are worthy of particular notice.
I need not dwell upon the associations of male and female for rearing their offspring, for providing it with food during their first steps in life, or for hunting in common; though it may be mentioned by the way that such associations are the rule even with the least sociable carnivores and rapacious birds; and that they derive a special interest from being the field upon which tenderer feelings develop even amidst otherwise most cruel animals.
If there is any positive evidence tending to prove that the small carnivores that we class as "vermin" are industrious and persistent destroyers of noxious rodents pocket gophers, moles, field-mice and rats or that they do not kill wild birds numerously, now is the time to produce it, because the tide of public sentiment is strongly setting against the weasels, mink, foxes and skunks.
The regularity and evenness of the dentition of the 'Anoplotherium', as contrasted with that of existing Artiodactyles, and the assumed nearer approach of the dentition of certain ancient Carnivores to the typical arrangement, have also been cited as exemplifications of a law of progressive development, but I know of no other cases based on positive evidence which are worthy of particular notice.
When we recollect what we saw in an earlier chapter about the evolution of grassy plains and the successive rises of the land during the Tertiary period, and when we reflect on the simultaneous advance of the carnivores, we can without difficulty realise this evolution of our familiar companion from a hyrax-like little animal of two million years ago.
The puma often kills full-grown cows and horses, but exhibits a still greater daring when attacking the jaguar, the largest of American carnivores, although, compared with its swift, agile enemy, as heavy as a rhinoceros.
No doubt these savages had been very well acquainted from ancient times with the animal's instinct of friendliness toward man, and its extreme hatred of other carnivores, which prey on the human species; and finding it ranged on their side, as it were, in the hard struggle of life in the desert, they were induced to spare it, and even to regard it as a friend; and such a feeling, among primitive men, might in the course of time degenerate into such a superstition as that of the Californians.
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