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Updated: September 13, 2025
Ay, for ages the mastodon had trodden this dust. And, ay, for ages later the bison. And, ay, for ages a people, over whose vanished towns and forts and graves had grown the trees of a thousand years, holding in the mighty claws of their roots the dust of those long, long secrets.
Organs are as essential for locomotion in a plastide particle as in a mastodon or megatherium, and if the microscope could only give back the proper response, we should see them, if not be filled with wonder at the marvellous perfection of their structure.
If I was right in calculating that the present delta of the Mississippi must have required many tens of thousands of years for its growth, and if the claims of the Natchez man to have co-existed with the mastodon are admitted, it would follow that North America was peopled by the human race many tens of thousands of years before our time.
Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size, vanished, and South America, though still retaining its connection with North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that of North America and the Old World.
One, in particular, we were told, obtained amongst them, namely, that the mastodon still exists in the fastnesses of the Upper Mackenzie. They describe it as a monster many times larger than the buffalo, and they dread going into the parts it is supposed to haunt.
The palæotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata.
They take us back to a remote era, before the time of Rome, of Greece, or of Egypt; far back beyond the origin of history or tradition, before our coast had taken its present shapes; before Shasta, and Lassen, and Castle Peaks had poured out their lava floods; before the Sacramento river had its birth; and while, if not before, the mastodon, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the horse, the mammoth bull, the tapir, and the bison lived in the land.
That it was intended for the sea one must suppose: yet it was evident that nothing of such odd draughtsmanship of such mastodon proportions had ever yet taken the water.
With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurs we get the huge cetaceans; in place of the deinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man himself.
But the boy in that epic moment had grown out of his stature. He felt the sword of vengeance in his hands; to him was intrusted the cause of Abel and of Walkham, of Ethel and of Jack. His was the struggle of the individual soul against the same blind and cruel fate that in the past had fashioned the ichthyosaurus and the mastodon.
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