Let us see what types of animals were thus preferred to them in
the next great application of selective processes.
CHAPTER XIII. THE BIRD AND THE MAMMAL
In one of his finest stories, Sur La Pierre Blanche, Anatole
France has imagined a group of Roman patricians discussing the
future of their Empire. The Christians, who are about to rise to
power on their ruin, they dismiss with amiable indifference as
one of the little passing eccentricities of the religious life of
their time. They have not the dimmest prevision, even as the
dream of a possibility, that in a century or two the Empire of
Rome will lie in the dust, and the cross will tower above all its
cities from York to Jerusalem. If we might for a moment endow the
animals of the Mesozoic world with AEsopian wisdom, we could
imagine some such discussion taking place between a group of
Deinosaur patricians. They would reflect with pride on the
unshakable empire of the reptiles, and perhaps glance with
disdain at two types of animals which hid in the recesses or fled
to the hills of the Jurassic world. And before another era of the
earth's story opened, the reptile race would be dethroned, and
these hunted and despised and feeble eccentricities of Mesozoic
life would become the masters of the globe.
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