15. Big Animals - Page 2

interests of truth should always be paramount,
and, if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at
least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with
popular delusions as this erring planet.

What, then, is the ordinary idea of 'geological time' in the minds of
people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact
antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and
contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed
for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa
hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the
tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs
and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris
Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of
the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the
great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a
picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a
thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old
times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid
Tavern, while Shakespeare and Molière, crowned with summer roses, sipped
their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the
Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to
produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of
Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors,
Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at
first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing
descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint
attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring
anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast lapse of
geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.

We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are
dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of æons,
each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each
of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of
innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose
pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief
lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to
the events narrated in this evening's _Pall Mall_, is less than a
second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can
possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of
Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he
has no means