onstrosity" resembling the rat-goat's condition occurring in the
teeth of any of the hundreds of thousands of these animals killed and
eaten by man, and therefore closely examined. Professor Bateson, who
a few years ago ransacked the museums of Europe for instances of
"discontinuous variation," or "sports," and wrote a valuable book on
the subject, did not discover any example of the kind. Apart from the
view, which is very generally held, that such sudden "mutations" as
"rat-teeth in a ruminant" are--even should they occur--not
perpetuated, we are not really in any way driven to suppose that the
rat-goat of Majorca originated in that island. It is true that we know
nothing like it in the Pliocene and Miocene of the Mediterranean
region which could have been its immediate ancestor. But probably the
ancestors of the rat-goat were slowly developed from a Miocene
sheath-horned ruminant, a primitive sort of antelope in some part of
North-west Africa, or in an extension of it now submerged in the
Atlantic, and stragglers of this curious and now lost Ruminant stock
were left in Majorca when in Miocene or early Pliocene times that
island became detached from its Hispano-African connection.

CHAPTER VIII

VEGETARIANS AND THEIR TEETH

No mistake, said Huxley, is more frequently made by clever people than
that of supposing that a cause or an opinion is unsound because the
arguments put forward in its favour by its advocates are foolish or
erroneous. Some of the arguments put forward in favour of the
exclusive use by mankind of a vegetable diet can be shown to be based
on misconception and error, and I propose now to mention one or two of
these. But I wish to guard against the supposition that I am convinced
in consequence that animal substances form the best possible diet for
man, or that an exclusively vegetable diet may not, if properly
selected, be advantageous for a large majority of mankind. That
question, as well as the question of the advantage of a mixed diet of
animal and vegetable substances, and the best proportion and quantity
of the substances so mixed, must be settled, as also the question as
to the harm or good in the habitual use of small quantities of
alcohol, by definite careful experiment by competent physiologists,
conducted on a scale large enough to give conclusive results. The
cogency of the arguments in favour of vegetarianism which I am about
to discuss is another matter.

In the first place