SPARE HALF HOURS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1934, 19 March 1891, Page 35

SPARE HALF HOURS.

t By F. A. Joseph. THE PRIMEVAL WORLD. To the ordinary wayfarer passing through life's journey, nothing appears more stable than the solid earth beneath his feet, and | nothing more enduring than the eternal hills. When measured by the standard of- a human life this is absolutely true, and the aged man over whose head has passed a storm of years can see no change in the aspect 'of the landscape familiar to his eyes from earliest childhood ; yet when measured in the eons recorded in the book of Nature by the geologist the solid earth becomes unstable as water, .and the "eternal hills "are found to have been born but yesterday, and to-morrow the place that knows them shall known them no more. The processes of Nature, ceaselessly in operation, tend towards a certain goal, and that goal may be summed up the one word — change. With the poet we may sing, " Change and decay in all around I see," and yet not decay in the sense ganerally accepted, for what appears decay is but transformation, New forms appear to fatten on the decay of past races. To the geologist every, period ot the past histpry of the globe is full of interest as he unrolls iold after fold of the scroll on which is written in characters incapable of misinterpretation the life history of our globe since that day on which it first became the abode of living creatures. The humblest organisms possess the greatest interest as they herald the dawn of that brighter day in which man appeared upon the scene ; but to the ordinary reader, who has neither the inclination nor the opportunity to follow the geologist or the paleontologist in his study, a popular description of the most curious or the most gigantic animals possesses more of interest. In the briefest study of the animal life of the Tertiary period we are brought face to face with an order of things ; such as only fancy's wildest dreams could picture. The animal life of Africa's darkest j forest or fjdensest jungle is tame and commonplace beside the animal life of some Tertiary continents. Monsters, evil looking ' as the horrors of a nightmare, skulked lin the foetid jungle or wallowed in the slime by river and lake side. When a giant serpent brood, armour - plated and furnished with cruel trenchant teeth, over-ran the earth, earth was no Eden. We find their fossil bones deep hidden in the Tertiary rock, so that their life history must be written by the paleontologist ; tbe silence of oblivion has passed over them. Yet from , a study of their reptilian descendants we j ' can learn much of these ancient monsters. i The analogy of Nature is a safe guide, for throughout the wide domain of animated Nature there is a definite plan. The great Cuvier was the first to discover the wonderful analogy which gave rise to the science of comparative anatomy. It was his belief that from a single bone, or even' in some cases a fragment of bone, the life history of the creature to which the bone belonged could be written. While some splendid achievements have been made in that way, as when Professor Owen described the moa with remarkable clearness from a single leg bone, yet the modern comparative anatomist prefers to get more than a single bone. Reasoning backward, then, along an unbroken line we can picture with tolerable certainty the appearance and habits of these gigantic reptiles. The student of natural history is therefore able to form a mental picture of that old world before the flood, aye, and before the advent of man, too, if we have interpreted the signs aright. Then a torrid sun, at closer proximity to the earth, blazed down upon a dank, teeming land surface, most of which was clothed in dense jungle and moisture-loving plants. Here was tbe home of the giant reptiles, almost all of which were oarnivorous. Picture a scene in this ancient forest, or by the shore of some sedge-fringed lake, and you will more fully appreciate Tennyson's line — •« Nature red in tooth and claw with ravine." Truly it was a time when terrible battles between giants must have made day and night hideous with slaughter. But we will turn from this evil pioture, and move across the centuries till we arrive at a more familiar time, when the earth was clad in familiar garb, and peopled with, animals

more like those of our favoured day i Among the animals of a past epoch there were many of gigantic size, so prone did Natnre appear to produce giants. A few of the giant mammals have left their bones in abundance, so that we are quite familiar with them, and can easily restore the animal from a perfect skeleton. The bear family appears to have been largely represented throughout Europe. There were many species, but the most notable was the cave bear, which at a later time is thought to have been the contemporary of primitive man. This bear was about a fourth larger than any living bear. Some skeletons have been discovered which measured 6£ft in height and 9Jft in length. The bones of the cave bear have been frequently found in caves along with the remains of human industry, so that we are justified in concluding that primitive man. was the contemporary of the cave bear. In the cave of Lherm, in France, the floor was covered with a deposit of fossiliferous mud, and in this have been found the teeth, shoulderblade, arm, and foot bones of a man, bones of the cave bear, bones of the anoient brown bear, remains of the cave hyena, the cave lion, the dog, the wolf, and Borne species of deer. The bones of the cave bear were abundant, and even Eome bones of embryos were found. Besides the human bones relics of human industry were found imbedded in the thick stalagmite incrustation on the cave floor. There were found a triangular flint knife, a round bone of a cave bear fashioned into a rude cutting instrument, three lower jawg with holes in them to hang them up by, and the trochings of a deer carved and pointed. The most curious relics were 20 half -jaws of the oave bear, wrought so- as to make the body of the jaw into a convenient handle, while the projecting canine tooth formed a kind of hook. In other caves in France similar evidenoe of the contemporaneity of man and the cave bear has been found. The cave hyena was very abundant throughout Europe. In size it surpassed the living hyena. Its remains are found associated with those of the cave bear in bone caverns, and they have also been discovered along with the bones of aurochs and the woolly -haired rhinoceros in the lower Diluvian strata. So plentiful were these hyenas in Greece that it is not improbable the lions of Thessaly, which, as told by Herodotus, attacked the beasts of burden accompanying the hosts of Xerces, were cave hyenas. Enormous quantities of the remains of the cave hyena were found in the famous cave or Bfrkdale, in Yorkshire. It is pretty certain that the cave had been occupied by successive generations of the cave hyena, which had dragged their prey into its recesses. The bones found were almost all cracked and gnawed, and had obviously been subjected to the action of hungry teeth. There wereseveral species of oave hyenas, all differing from living types, and altogether these fierce oarnivora must have occupied Europe in strong force. The oave lion and tiger I will leave for a future occasion, as they each possess considerable interest.