climate; and, therefore, it is not
surprising to know that, in earliest ages, animals and plants flourished
in regions to which they would now be altogether unfitted, and that
many races existed then which have since died out; for geological and
climatal modifications are among the most easily conceivable causes of
the decease of species.

In the great swamps of emerging Germany, and in the, as yet, only
half-drained valleys of Switzerland, lurked then the heavy Dinothere.
Huger than the hugest elephant, he carried an enormous body of twenty
feet in length, vast and barrel-like, which even his columnar limbs of
ten feet long scarcely sufficed to raise from the ground. His uncouth
head, elephantine in shape, was furnished with a short proboscis; and
two tusks, short and strong, projected from the lower jaw, not curving
upward, as in the elephant, but downward, as in the walrus. In the
teeming marshes lurked this ungainly beast, half immersed, digging out
with his mighty pickaxe-tusks the succulent roots that permeated the
soft soil, which his sensitive trunk picked up, and conveyed to his
mouth.

On the southern slopes of the slowly-rising Himalayas, already clothed
with forests of teak, and palm, and bamboo, revelled the Sivathere,
another heavy creature, of the bulk of a rhinoceros, and therefore not
more than half equalling the German colossus. He too was a strange
subject. With a proportionally enormous head, in form somewhat between
that of the elephant and of the rhinoceros, minute sunken piggish eyes,
and a short proboscis like that of the tapir, he carried two pairs of
dissimilar horns. On the forehead were placed one pair, seated upon bony
cores, not unlike those of our short-horn oxen. Behind these there rose
another pair, large and massive, which were palmated and branching,
like those of the fallow-deer, but on a gigantic scale. What sort of a
body, and what kind of limbs, furnished the complement of this
curiously-compound head, we do not exactly know; but surely it must have
been a very remarkable form, as it browsed quietly and blamelessly,
among the luxuriant shrubs of those sun-facing slopes.

In the same regions a land Tortoise of enormous bulk, far vaster than
the vastest of now existing species, to which that ponderous one which
will march merrily away with a ton weight on its back, is a mere pigmy,
shook the earth with its waddle, and the forests with its hoarse
bellowing. Broad roads, like our h