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Graph Searching Games and
Probabilistic Methods
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Graph Searching Games and
Probabilistic Methods

Anthony Bonato
Pralat Pawel
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
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Contents

List of Figures xiii

List of Tables xvii

Preface xix

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Asymptotic Notation and Useful Inequalities . . . 12
1.4 Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.5 Tools: First and Second Moment Methods . . . . . 17
1.6 Tools: Chernoff Bounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2 The game of Cops and Robbers 29

2.1 Binomial Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.2 Graphs with a Given Cop Number . . . . . . . . . 37
2.3 Properties of Almost All Cop-Win Graphs . . . . . 43
2.4 Properties of Almost All k-Cop-Win Graphs . . . . 47
2.5 Random Geometric Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.6 Percolated Random Geometric Graphs . . . . . . . 60

3 Variations of Cops and Robbers 69

3.1 Playing on Edges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.2 Cops and Fast Robbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.3 Lazy Cops and Robbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.4 Cops and Falling Robbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.5 Containment Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

ix
x Contents

4 Zombies and Survivors 101

4.1 The Cost of Being Undead Can Be High . . . . . . 103
4.2 Cycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4.3 Hypercubes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4.4 Toroidal Grids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

5 Large cop number and Meyniel’s conjecture 125

5.1 Upper Bounds for c(n) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.2 Binomial Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
5.3 Random d-Regular Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
5.4 Meyniel Extremal Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

6 Graph cleaning 155

6.1 Tools: Convergence of Moments Method . . . . . . 160
6.2 Binomial Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
6.3 Tools: Pairing Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
6.4 Random Regular Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.5 Tools: Differential Equation Method . . . . . . . . 177
6.6 DE Method in Graph Cleaning . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.7 Game Brush Number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

7 Acquaintance time 201

7.1 Dense Binomial Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . 202
7.2 Sparse Binomial Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . 205
7.3 Is the Upper Bound Tight? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
7.4 Hypergraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
7.5 Random Geometric Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

8 Firefighting 231
8.1 Tool: Expander Mixing Lemma . . . . . . . . . . . 233
8.2 The k = 1 Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
8.3 The k > 1 Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
8.4 Fighting Constrained Fires in Graphs . . . . . . . 247

9 Acquisition Number 255

9.1 Binomial Random Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
9.2 Random Geometric Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
9.3 Randomly Weighted Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
 Contents xi

10 Temporal parameters 275

10.1 Capture Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
10.2 Overprescribed Cops and Robbers . . . . . . . . . 281
10.3 Deterministic Burning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
10.4 Random Burning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
10.5 Cops and Drunk (but Visible) Robbers . . . . . . . 300
10.6 Cops and Drunk (and Invisible) Robbers . . . . . . 306

11 Miscellaneous topics 313

11.1 Toppling Number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
11.2 Revolutionary and Spies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
11.3 Robot Crawler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
11.4 Seepage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

Bibliography 357

Index 375
List of Figures

1.1 An example of a graph of order and size 4. . . . . 2

1.2 The graph G and its complement G. . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 Two graphs isomorphic to the Petersen graph. . . 4
1.4 A disconnected graph with 4 components. . . . . . 5
1.5 The line graph of the Petersen graph (see Fig-
ure 1.3). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.6 An example of a digraph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 x2
1.7 The functions: ϕ(x), x2 , and 2(1+x/3) . . . . . . . . 25

2.1 A cop-win ordering of a cop-win graph. . . . . . . 31

2.2 The strong power (P3 )2⊠ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.3 The (1, k)-e.c. property. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.4 A graph becomes cop-win after a universal vertex
is added. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.5 A partition of V (G), where the subgraph induced
by B is claimed to be cop-win. . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.6 The white vertices dominate the Petersen graph. . 48
2.7 Catching the robber on G2 (r). . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.8 The definition of the Ui,j , not drawn to scale. . . 62
2.9 The robber tries to cross a path guarded by team
Ti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.10 The adapted Aigner and Fromme strategy. . . . . 67

3.1 A minimum edge cover of the Petersen graph. . . 71

3.2 The robber can move to u but not to v. . . . . . . 74
3.3 A winning first move for the cops on Q3 . . . . . . 85
3.4 The graph K4 has a containability number equal-
ing 3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

xiii
xiv List of Figures

3.5 The zigzag functions representing the ordinary

cop number (blue) and the containability number
(red). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

4.1 The graph Gn has a large cost of being undead. . 103

4.2 If at some point the survivor is on the white ver-
tex and all the zombies are at distance 2 or 3 on
the grey vertices, and the survivor is moving away
from the zombies, then they can keep the same
direction indefinitely on Tn and survive. . . . . . . 113
4.3 Approximate depiction of the survivor’s strategy
when a new zombie approaches. The black arrows
describe the trajectory of the survivor and the dot-
ted lines the trajectory of the zombie. . . . . . . . 115
4.4 Examples of four strategies for the first M moves. 120
4.5 Examples of four more strategies for the first M
moves. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.6 A closer look at Strategy (d). . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

5.1 Henri Meyniel. Photo courtesy of Geňa Hahn. . . 126

5.2 The boundary of the gray vertices are the black
vertices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
5.3 A graph of the zigzag function f . . . . . . . . . . 133
5.4 The Fano plane and its incidence graph. . . . . . . 147
5.5 The robber must move to L or be captured. . . . . 149

6.1 A cleaning process with brushes represented by

the stars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
6.2 Upper bounds of b(G)/dn in the very supercritical
phase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
6.3 Solution to the differential equations modeling the
brush number in the d-regular case. . . . . . . . . 188
6.4 Solutions to the differential equations modeling
the brush number in the 4-regular case. . . . . . . 190
6.5 Solutions to the differential equations modeling
the brush number in the 5-regular case. . . . . . . 192
6.6 A graph of ud /dn and ℓd /dn versus d (from 3 to
100). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
 List of Figures xv

7.1 An example of a good tree. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

8.1 The fire, represented by squares, starts on the bot-

tom right and moves left until fully blocked. Pro-
tected vertices are surrounded by circles. . . . . . 232
8.2 The fire starts on a degree 4 vertex. The circles
are protected vertices and squares are the fire. . . 238
8.3 The fire starts on a degree 2 vertex. . . . . . . . . 239
8.4 In the graph G, the choice of vertices burned by
the fire affects how many vertices are saved. . . . 248

9.1 In this configuration of weights, the right end-

vertex is the sole member of a residual set. . . . . 255
9.2 The recursive tree Tρ with the cut-off property. . . 259
9.3 Residual sets contain at least one vertex from each
dangerous square. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

10.1 Burning the path P4 (the open circles represent

burned vertices). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
10.2 A lollipop graph, L(7, 1/2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304

11.1 A volatile and a stable configuration on P5 . . . . . 314

11.2 An unguarded meeting of two revolutionaries.
Three spies can prevent unguarded meetings. . . . 326
11.3 A DAG where 2 greens are needed to win. The
white vertices are the sinks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
List of Tables

6.1 Approximate upper and lower bounds on the

brush number. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

10.1 The possible ways in which the robber can be cap-

tured. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

xvii
Preface

The intersection of graph searching and probabilistic methods is a

new topic within graph theory, with applications to graph search-
ing problems such as the game of Cops and Robbers and its many
variants, graph cleaning, Firefighting, and acquaintance time. Re-
search on this topic emerged only over the last few years, and as
such, it represents a rapidly evolving and dynamic area. Before we
give a definition of this topic, we give some background on three
of its key constituents: the probabilistic method, random graphs,
and graph searching.
The probabilistic method is a powerful nonconstructive tool in
mathematics. While it has found tremendous success in combina-
torics and graph theory, it has been successfully applied to many
other areas of mathematics (such as number theory, algebra, and
analysis) as well as theoretical computer science (for example, ran-
domized algorithms). As one of its goals, the method may prove
the existence of an object with given properties without actually
finding it. A random graph is a graph that is generated by some
random process. Although technically a topic within the proba-
bilistic method, random graphs are an important topic in their own
right. The theory of random graphs lies at the intersection between
graph theory and probability theory, and studies the properties of
typical random graphs. Random graphs have also found a natural
home in the study of real-world complex networks such as the web
graph and on-line social networks.
Graph searching deals with the analysis of games and graph
processes that model some form of intrusion in a network, and ef-
forts to eliminate or contain that intrusion. For example, in Cops
and Robbers, a robber is loose on the network, and a set of cops at-
tempts to capture the robber. How the players move and the rules
of capture depend on which variant is studied. In graph cleaning,

xix
xx Preface

the network begins as contaminated, and brushes move between

vertices and along edges to clean them. There are many variants
of graph searching studied in the literature, which are either mo-
tivated by problems in practice, or are inspired by foundational
issues in computer science, discrete mathematics, and artificial in-
telligence, such as robotics, counterterrorism, and network secu-
rity. In the past few years, a number of problems have emerged
from applications related to the structure of real-world networks
that are expected to be large-scale and dynamic, and where agents
can be probabilistic, decentralized, and even selfish or antagonis-
tic. This is one of the reasons why the field of graph searching is
nowadays rapidly expanding. Several new models, problems, or ap-
proaches have appeared, relating it to diverse fields such as random
walks, game theory, logic, probabilistic analysis, complex networks,
mobile robotics, and distributed computing.
Graph searching games and probabilistic methods take two sep-
arate, but intertwined approaches: the study of graph searching
games on random graphs and processes, and the use of the prob-
abilistic method to prove results about deterministic graphs. We
will see both approaches many times throughout the book. One of
goals of this monograph is to bring the intersection of probabilis-
tic methods and graph searching games into a place more readily
visible to researchers. While we do not claim to make an exhaus-
tive account, the material presented here is a survey of some main
results in this new field. Our intended audience is broad, including
both mathematicians and computer scientists. Since our approach
is to be self-contained wherever possible, much of the material is
accessible to students (mainly graduate but also advanced under-
graduates) with some background in graph theory and probability.
We present eleven chapters that can be read in order, or the
first three chapters read first, with the reader then moving to
whichever chapter captures their interest. Chapter 1 supplies the
required background and notation in graph theory, asymptotics,
and discrete probability used throughout the remaining chapters.
Chapter 2 focuses on one of the most popular graph searching
games, Cops and Robbers. We discuss there the cop number of
random graphs, properties of almost all cop-win and k-cop-win
 Preface xxi

graphs. Variants of Cops and Robbers, where for example, the

players play on edges or the robber can move at infinite speed, are
considered in Chapter 3. We devote Chapter 4 to the new vertex
pursuit game of Zombies and Survivors, where the zombies (the
cops) appear randomly and always move along shortest paths to
the survivor (the robber). In Chapter 5, we discuss one of the most
important conjectures in the area, Meyniel’s conjecture on the cop
number. We summarize there some recent work on the proof of the
conjecture for random graphs. Chapter 6 focuses on graph clean-
ing, and Chapter 7 discusses acquaintance time. Chapter 8 focuses
the Firefighter graph process, and Chapter 9 focuses on acquisition
number. In Chapter 10, we present topics on temporal parameters
such as capture time. The final chapter presents a number of mis-
cellaneous topics, ranging from Revolutionaries and Spies, robot
crawler, and toppling number, to the game of Seepage played on
acyclic directed graphs.
We would like to give a collective thanks to our co-authors,
post-doctoral fellows, and students, who inspire us every day. In-
deed, many of their results are highlighted throughout. Thanks
to Deepak Bal, William Kinnersley, and Dieter Mitsche for their
careful reading of early drafts of the book. Thank you to Doug
West for supporting the book through his role as editor at CRC
Press, and we highly valued the assistance received there from Bob
Ross and Jose Soto. Last but certainly not least we would like to
thank our families for their constant love and support: Douglas,
Anna Maria, and Lisa and Anna, Piotr, Adam, and Julia.
Chapter 1
Introduction

The discussion in this first chapter will give us a common reference

to present the results on the intersection of probabilistic methods
and graph searching games. As the name suggests, this is a book
on graphs and probability (we will deal with the searching part
more explicitly in the following chapters). With a combinatorial
audience in mind, we devote a few brief pages to summarize some
notation from graph theory, and spend more time covering a few
elementary but key theorems in discrete probability. An advanced
reader may safely skim these pages and move directly to Chap-
ter 2; this chapter may be used, nevertheless, as a quick reference
for statements of key facts (like the Chernoff bounds) that we
freely use later. More involved tools, such as martingales or the
differential equations method, will be introduced in later chapters
as needed.

Some basic notation comes first. The set of natural numbers

(excluding 0 for notation simplicity, although this notation often
includes 0) is written N while the rationals and reals are denoted
by Q and R, respectively. If n is a natural number, then define

[n] = {1, 2, . . . n}.

The Cartesian product of two sets A and B is written A × B. The

difference of two sets A and B is written A\B. We use the notation
log n for the logarithm in the natural base.

1
2 Graph Searching Games and Probabilistic Methods

1.1 Graphs
Graphs are our main objects of study. For further background
in graph theory, the reader is directed to any of the texts [34, 76,
180].
A graph G = (V, E) is a pair consisting of a vertex set V =
V (G), an edge set E = E(G) consisting of pairs of vertices. Note
that E is taken as a multiset, as its elements may occur more than
once. We write uv if u and v form an edge, and say that u and
v are adjacent or joined. For consistency, we will use the former
term only. We refer to u and v as endpoints of the edge uv. The
order of a graph is |V (G)|, and its size is |E(G)|. Graphs are often
depicted by their drawings; see Figure 1.2.

✉
❅
❅
❅
❅
❅
✉ ❅✉
❅
❅
❅
❅
❅
❅✉

FIGURE 1.1: An example of a graph of order and size 4.

A loop is an edge whose endpoints are equal. Multiple edges

are edges having the same pair of endpoints. If u and v are the
endpoints of an edge, then we say that they are neighbors. The
neighborhood N(v) = NG (v) of a vertex v is the set of all neighbors
of v. We usually restrict our attention to simple graphs; that is,
graphs without loops and multiple edges. Further, we only consider
finite graphs.
 Introduction 3

The degree of a vertex v in G, written degG (v), is the number

of neighbors of v in G; that is, degG (v) = |N(v)|. We will drop
the subscript G if the graph is clear from context. The number
δ(G) = minv∈V (G) deg(v) is the minimum degree of G, and the
number ∆(G) = maxv∈V (G) deg(v) is the maximum degree of G. A
graph is k-regular if each vertex has degree k.
The complement G of a graph G is the graph with vertex set
V (G) = V (G) and edge set E(G) defined by uv ∈ E(G) if and
only if uv ∈
/ E(G). See Figure 1.2. A clique (sometimes called a
complete graph) is a set of pairwise-adjacent vertices. The clique of
order n is denoted by Kn . An independent set (sometimes called
an empty graph) is a set of pairwise-nonadjacent vertices. Note
that an independent set is the complement of a clique.

cs sc
❅
❅
❅
as ❅s d as sd
❅
❅
❅
s ❅s
G b b G

FIGURE 1.2: The graph G and its complement G.

A graph G is bipartite if V (G) = X ∪ Y , where X ∩ Y = ∅, and

every edge is of the form xy, where x ∈ X and y ∈ Y ; here X and
Y are called partite sets. The complete bipartite graph Km,n is the
graph with partite sets X, Y with |X| = m, |Y | = n, and edge set

E = {xy : x ∈ X, y ∈ Y }.

A graph G′ = (V ′ , E ′ ) is a subgraph of G = (V, E) if V ′ ⊆ V

and E ′ ⊆ E. We say that G′ is a spanning subgraph if V ′ = V . If
V ′ ⊆ V , then

G[V ′ ] = (V ′ , {uv ∈ E : u, v ∈ V ′ })
4 Graph Searching Games and Probabilistic Methods

is the subgraph of G induced by V ′ . Similarly, if E ′ ⊆ E, then

G[E ′ ] = (V ′ , E ′ ) where
V ′ = {v ∈ V : there exists e ∈ E ′ such that v ∈ e}
is an induced subgraph of G by E ′ . Given a graph G = (V, E) and
a vertex v ∈ V , we define G − v = G[V \ {v}]. For an edge e, G − e
is the subgraph formed by deleting e.
An isomorphism from a graph G to a graph H is a bijec-
tion f : V (G) → V (H) such that uv ∈ E(G) if and only if
f (u)f (v) ∈ E(H). G is isomorphic to H, written G ∼ = H, if there
is an isomorphism from G to H. See Figure 1.3 for two isomorphic
graphs.

FIGURE 1.3: Two graphs isomorphic to the Petersen graph.

A walk in a graph G = (V, E) from vertex u to vertex v is a

sequence W = (u = v0 , v1 , . . . , vl = v) if vi vi+1 ∈ E for 0 ≤ i < l.
The length l(W ) of a walk W is the number of vertices in W minus
1 (that is, the number of edges). A walk is closed if v0 = vl . A
path is a walk in which the internal vertices are distinct. The path
of order n is denoted by Pn . A cycle is a closed path of length at
least 3. We use the notation Cn for a cycle of order n. A graph
G is connected if there is a walk (equivalently, a path) between
every pair of vertices; otherwise, G is disconnected . See Figure 1.4.
A connected component (or just component) of a graph G is a
maximal connected subgraph. A connected component consisting
of a single vertex is called an isolated vertex. A vertex adjacent to
all other vertices is called universal.
 Introduction 5

A forest is a graph with no cycle. A tree is a connected forest;

hence, every component of a forest is a tree. Each tree on n vertices
has size n−1. An end-vertex is a vertex of degree 1; note that every
nontrivial tree (that is, a tree of order at least 2) has at least two
end-vertices. A spanning tree is a spanning subgraph that is a tree.
The graph Pn and an n-vertex star K1,n−1 are trees. A hypercube
of dimension n, written Qn , has vertices elements of {0, 1}n , with
two vertices adjacent if they differ in exactly one coordinate. In
particular, Qn has order 2n and size n2n−1 .

t t t t
❅ ❅
t t ❅
❅t t ❅
❅t t
❅ ❅
❅
❅t t t ❅
❅t t

FIGURE 1.4: A disconnected graph with 4 components.

For distinct vertices u and v, the distance between u and v,

written dG (u, v) (or just d(u, v)) is the length of a shortest path
connecting u and v if such a path exists, and ∞, otherwise. We
take the distance between a vertex and itself to be 0. The diame-
ter of a connected graph G, written diam(G), is the maximum of
all distances between vertices. If the graph is disconnected, then
diam(G) is ∞. For a nonnegative integer r and vertex u in G, de-
fine Nr (u) to be set of those vertices of distance r from u in G.
Note that N0 (u) = {u} and N1 (u) = N(u).
The breadth-first search (BFS) process is a graph search algo-
rithm that begins at the root vertex v and explores all the neigh-
boring vertices. Then for each of those neighboring vertices, it ex-
plores their unexplored neighbors, and so on, until it explores the
whole connected component containing vertex v. Formally, the al-
gorithm starts by putting vertex v into a FIFO queue; that is, First
In, First Out. In each round, one vertex is taken from the queue
and all neighbors that have not yet been discovered are added to
the queue. The process continues until the queue is empty. It may
6 Graph Searching Games and Probabilistic Methods

be shown that the BFS process naturally yields the breadth-first

search tree.
A dominating set of a graph G = (V, E) is a set U ⊆ V such
that every vertex v ∈ V \ U has at least one neighbor in U. The
domination number of G, written γ(G), is the minimum cardinality
of a dominating set in G. Note that the vertex set V is a domi-
nating set. However, it is usually possible to find a much smaller
dominating set (for example, consider a graph with a universal
vertex).
A matching in a graph G is a 1-regular subgraph. A matching
is maximal if it cannot be extended by adding an edge. A matching
is maximum if it contains the largest possible number of edges. A
perfect matching in a graph G is a matching in G that is a spanning
subgraph of G.
The line graph of a graph G, written L(G), is the graph whose
vertices are the edges of G, with ef ∈ E(L(G)) when e = uv
and f = vw are both in E(G). See Figure 1.5 for an example. For

FIGURE 1.5: The line graph of the Petersen graph (see Figure 1.3).

graphs G and H, define the Cartesian product of G and H, written

GH, to have vertices V (G) × V (H), and vertices (a, b) and (c, d)
are adjacent if a = c and bd ∈ E(H) or ac ∈ E(G) and b = d.
We can assign a direction to each edge of a graph G. A simple
directed graph (or digraph) G = (V, E) is a pair consisting of a
vertex set V = V (G) and an edge set E = E(G) ⊆ {(x, y) : x, y ∈
V (G), x 6= y}. See Figure 1.6; we use the arrow notation to depict
an edge pointing from vertex to vertex. The in-degree of a vertex
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 BIG ANIMALS.
“The Atlantosaurus,” said I, pointing affectionately with a wave
of my left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct reptile,
“is estimated to have had a total length of one hundred feet,
and was probably the very biggest lizard that ever lived, even in
Western America, where his earthly remains were first
disinhumed by an enthusiastic explorer,”
“Yes, yes,” my friend answered abstractedly. “Of course, of
course; things were all so very big in those days, you know, my
dear fellow.”
“Excuse me,” I replied with polite incredulity; “I really don’t
know to what particular period of time the phrase ‘in those days’
may be supposed precisely to refer.”
My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I will admit
that I was taking a mean advantage of him. The professorial
lecture in private life, especially when followed by a strict
examination, is quite undeniably a most intolerable nuisance.)
“Well,” he said, in a crusty voice, after a moment’s hesitation, “I
mean, you know, in geological times ... well, there, my dear
fellow, things used all to be so very big in those days, usedn’t
they?”
I took compassion upon him and let him off easily. “You’ve had
enough of the museum,” I said with magnanimous self-denial.
“The Atlantosaurus has broken the camel’s back. Let’s go and
have a quiet cigarette in the park outside.”
But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my
forbearance so far as to let you, too, off the remainder of that
geological disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A
discourse which would be quite unpardonable in social
intercourse may be freely admitted in the privacy of print;
because, you see, while you can’t easily tell a man that his
conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing
so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book
whenever you like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of
hurting the authors delicate susceptibilities.
The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the
conventional sermon, into two heads—the precise date of
“geological times,” and the exact bigness of the animals that
lived in them. And I may as well begin by announcing my
general conclusion at the very outset; first, that “those days”
never existed at all; and secondly, that the animals which now
inhabit this particular planet are, on the whole, about as big,
taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary fauna that
ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful surface. I
know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down one
more universal and cherished belief: everybody considers that
“geological animals” were ever so much bigger than their
modern representatives; but the 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 Shakespere 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
laps 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 by which he could
discriminate in date between a scarabæus of Thothmes, a
denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most
Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have
shown good grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended
about 80,000 years ago; and everything that has happened
since the Glacial Epoch is, from the geological point of view,
described as “recent.” A shell embedded in a clay cliff sixty or
seventy thousand years ago, while short and swarthy
Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the
irruption of the “Ancient Britons” of our inadequate school-
books, is, in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as
purely modern.
But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty
thousand years which coincides in part with the fraction of a
single swing of the cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and
days, and weeks, and months, and years, and centuries, and
ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an inconceivable past, whose
vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one beyond the other, to
our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of the geological
record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the Pliocene,
immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time;
and before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the
Eocene, immeasurably longer than all the others put together.
These three make up in their sum the Tertiary period, which
entire period can hardly have occupied more time in its passage
than a single division of the Secondary, such as the Cretaceous,
or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and the Secondary period, once
more, though itself of positively appalling duration, seems but a
patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the unthinkable
and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary
æons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott’s
mystic head, “Time was, Time is, Time will be.” The time we
know affords us no measure at all for even the nearest and
briefest epochs of the time we know not; and the time we know
not seems to demand still vaster and more inexpressible figures
as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes, into its dimmest
and earliest recesses.
These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one’s head swim;
let us hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny
bigness of our earthly animals, living or extinct.
If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and
terrestrial, we shall soon see that we could bring together at the
present moment a very goodly collection of extant monsters,
most parlous monsters, too, each about as fairly big in its own
kind as almost anything that has ever preceded it. Every age
has its own spécialité in the way of bigness; in one epoch it is
the lizards that take suddenly to developing overgrown
creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in
another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into
Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the
proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a
fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to
evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic
Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most
undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future
geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of
the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of
our “Alerts” and “Challengers,” but then upheaved into snow-
clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will doubtless stand aghast
at the huge skeletons of our whales and our razor-backs, and
will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in the exact
words of my friend at South Kensington, “Things used all to be
so very big in those days, usedn’t they?”
Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans
and of “geological” animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the
Western American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very
largest creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary
sphere. His entire length is supposed to have reached about a
hundred feet (for no complete skeleton has ever been
discovered), while in stature he appears to have stood some
thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a very
big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet,
or two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a
British Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of
height and size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a
good length of seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to
eighty, ninety, and even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly
entitled to say that we have at least one species of animal now
living which, occasionally at any rate, equals in size the very
biggest and most colossal form known inferentially to geological
science. Indeed, when we consider the extraordinary
compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as
compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge
Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of
a decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the
gigantic Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, in propria
persona. I doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of
the deinosaur could ever have supported the prodigious weight
of a full-grown family razor-back whale. The mental picture of
these unwieldy monsters hopping casually about, like Alice’s
Gryphon in Tenniel’s famous sketch, or like that still more
parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be left to the
vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in the
details for himself as well as he is able.
If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens
(always an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of
our contemporary fauna, I venture confidently to claim for our
own existing human period as fine a collection of big animals as
any other ever exhibited on this planet by any one single rival
epoch. Of course, if you are going to lump all the extinct
monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified fauna,
regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you;
I will candidly admit that there were more great men in all
previous generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from
Agamemnon to Wellington, than there are now existing in this
last quarter of our really very respectable nineteenth century.
But if you compare honestly age with age, one at a time, I
fearlessly maintain that, so far from there being any falling off in
the average bigness of things generally in these latter days,
there are more big things now living than there ever were in
any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the
“recent” period.
I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that
there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the
history of our earth—the Jurassic period, which was the zenith
of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of
the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. I say on purpose,
“from the evidence before us,” because, as I shall go on to
explain hereafter, I do not myself believe that any one age has
much surpassed another in the general size of its fauna, since
the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get geological
evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular
deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit
was laid down under conditions unfavorable to the preservation
of the remains of large species. For example, the sediment now
being accumulated at the bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly
contain the bones of any creature much larger than the Caspian
seal, because there are no big species there swimming; and yet
that fact does not negative the existence in other places of
whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami.
Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if
we compare our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and
Pliocene times, we shall at any rate be putting it to the test of
the severest competition that lies within our power under the
actual circumstances.
In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very
big reptiles. “A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of
earth. For him did his high sun flame and his river billowing ran,
And he felt himself in his pride to be nature’s crowning race.”
There was the ichthyosaurus, a fishlike marine lizard, familiar to
us all from a thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body,
his strong flippers, his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring
goggle eyes. The ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant
creature to meet alone in a narrow strait on a dark night; but if
it comes to actual measurement, the very biggest
ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed twenty-
five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent size
for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the
two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of
sixteen feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily
beat the ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons
or rock snakes, which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and
measure round the waist as much as a London alderman of the
noblest proportions. Of course, other Jurassic saurians easily
beat this simple record. Our British Megalosaurus only extended
twenty-five feet in length, and carried weight not exceeding
three tons; but his rival Ceteosaurus stood ten feet high, and
measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout to the end of his
tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be briefly
described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as
one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly
nothing at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a
group, show an assemblage of species which could very
favorably compete with the whole lot of Jurassic saurians at any
cattle show. Indeed, if it came to tonnage, I believe a good
blubbery right whale could easily give points to any deinosaur
that ever moved upon oolitic continents.
The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the
deinotherium and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very
big things in livestock; but they scarcely exceeded the modern
elephant, and by no means came near the modern whales. A
few colossal ruminants of the same period could have held their
own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and buffaloes; but
taking the group as a group, I don’t think there is any reason to
believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of this
present age.
For few people ever really remember how very many big
animals we still possess. We have the Indian and the African
elephant, the hippopotamus, the various rhinoceroses, the
walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison, the musk ox, the
dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are generally in
all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and most
people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common
and ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied
assortment of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common
form. As a matter of fact, however, there are several dozen
colossal marine animals now sporting and spouting in all
oceans, as distinct from one another as the camel is from the
ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New Zealand
Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is
more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our
rorqual, one hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of
the gigantic American Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these
exceptional monsters, our bottle-heads reach to forty feet, our
California whales to forty-four, our hump-backs to fifty, and our
razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True fish generally fall far short
of these enormous dimensions, but some of the larger sharks
attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans. The
common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity,
would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for
the best bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite.
I would back our modern Carcharodon, who grows to forty feet,
against any plesiosaurus that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for
Rhinodon, a gigantic shark of the Indian Ocean, he has been
actually measured to a length of fifty feet, and is stated often to
attain seventy. I will stake my reputation upon it that he would
have cleared the secondary seas of their great saurians in less
than a century. When we come to add to these enormous
marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the
great snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and
manatees, and sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared
fearlessly to challenge any other age that ever existed to enter
the lists against our own colossal forms of animal life.
Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very
big animals which people have in their minds when they talk
vaguely about everything having been so very much bigger “in
those days” have become extinct within a very late period, and
are often, from the geological point of view, quite recent.
For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no
animal is more frequently present to the mind of the non-
geological speaker, when he talks indefinitely about the great
extinct monsters, than the familiar figure of that huge-tusked,
hairy northern elephant. Yet the mammoth, chronologically
speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was hunted here in
England by men whose descendants are probably still living—at
least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in
Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that
the wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question
as to its fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the
yesterday of geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that
finally killed off the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his
neighbor, the mastodon. That big tertiary proboscidean did not
live quite long enough, it is true, to be hunted by the cavemen
of the Pleistocene age, but he survived at any rate as long as
the Pliocene—our day before yesterday—and he often fell very
likely before the fire-split flint weapons of the Abbé Bourgeois’
Miocene men. The period that separates him from our own day
is as nothing compared with the vast and immeasurable interval
that separates him from the huge marine saurians of the
Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with
human chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as
Beau Brummel stands to the modern masher, while the saurians
stand to it as the Egyptian and Assyrian warriors stand to Lord
Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.
Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that
enormous bird who was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the
antelope; a monstrous emu, as far surpassing the ostriches of
to-day as the ostriches surpass all the other fowls of the air. Yet
the moa, though now extinct, is in the strictest sense quite
modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen Elizabeth or
Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little time
before the first white settlements in the great southern
archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live
down to the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori
encampments are still discovered, with the ashes of the fire-
place even now unscattered, and the close-gnawed bones of the
gigantic bird lying in the very spot where the natives left them
after their destructive feasts. So, too, with the big sharks. Our
modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before noted) to forty
feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, as times
go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure nearly two
inches long by one and a half broad, would disdain to make two
bites of the able-bodied British seaman. But the naturalists of
the “Challenger” expedition dredged up in numbers from the
ooze of the Pacific similar teeth, five inches long by four wide,
so that the sharks to which they originally belonged must, by
parity of reasoning, have measured nearly a hundred feet in
length. This, no doubt, beats our biggest existing shark, the
rhinodon, by some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific is a
quite recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being
accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really
nothing astonishing in the discovery that some representatives
of these colossal carcharodons are to this day swimming about
at their lordly leisure among the coral reefs of the South Sea
Islands. That very cautious naturalist, Dr. Günther, of the British
Museum, contents himself indeed by merely saying: “As we
have no record of living individuals of that bulk having been
observed, the gigantic species to which these teeth belonged
must probably have become extinct within a comparatively
recent period.”
If these things are so, the question naturally suggests itself:
Why should certain types of animals have attained their greatest
size at certain different epochs, and been replaced at others by
equally big animals of wholly unlike sorts? The answer, I believe,
is simply this: Because there is not room and food in the world
at any one time for more than a certain relatively small number
of gigantic species. Each great group of animals has had
successively its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage;
each at the period of its highest development has produced a
considerable number of colossal forms; each has been
supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different
structure, which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed
by actual stress of battle, but by irresistible competition for food
and prey. The great saurians were thus succeeded by the great
mammals, just as the great mammals are themselves in turn
being ousted, from the land at least, by the human species.
Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world,
so far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary
record of the geological remains.
The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe, what
is otherwise quite probable; that life on our planet began with
very small forms—that it passed at first through a baby stage.
The animals of the Cambrian period are almost all small
mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and other simple, primitive types
of life. There were as yet no vertebrates of any sort, not even
fishes, far less amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals. The
veritable giants of the Cambrian world were the crustaceans,
and especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly
exceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest trilobite
is some two feet long; and though we cannot by any means say
that this was really the largest form of animal life then existing,
owing to the extremely broken nature of the geological record,
we have at least no evidence that anything bigger as yet moved
upon the face of the waters. The trilobites, which were a sort of
triple-tailed crabs (to speak very popularly), began in the
Cambrian Epoch, attained their culminating point in the Silurian,
wandered in the Devonian, and died out utterly in the
Carboniferous seas.
It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish
tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the
squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance
upon this or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the
most developed of invertebrate animals; they are rapid
swimmers; they have large and powerful eyes; and they can
easily enfold their prey (teste Victor Hugo) in their long and
slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural advantages to back
them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family rapidly made
their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced
thinkers and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at
once to be the dominant creatures of the primæval ocean in
which they swam. There were as yet no saurians or whales to
dispute the dominion with these rapacious cephalopods, and so
the cuttle family had things for the time all their own way.
Before the end of the Silurian epoch, according to that accurate
census-taker, M. Barrande, they had blossomed forth into no
less than 1,622 distinct species. For a single family to develop
so enormous a variety of separate forms, all presumably derived
from a single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense
success in life; and it also argues a vast lapse of time during
which the different species were gradually demarcated from one
another.
Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish
group, soon attained a very considerable size; but a shell known
as the orthoceras (I wish my subject didn’t compel me to use
such very long words, but I am not personally answerable,
thank heaven, for the vagaries of modern scientific
nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than that of any other fossil
mollusk, sometimes measuring as much as six feet in total
length. At what date the gigantic cuttles of the present day first
began to make their appearance it would be hard to say, for
their shell-less bodies are so soft that they could leave hardly
anything behind in a fossil state; but the largest known cuttle,
measured by Mr. Gabriel, of Newfoundland, was eighty feet in
length, including the long arms.
These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the running so
far as colossal size is concerned, and it will be observed that
here the largest modern specimen immeasurably beats the
largest fossil form of the same type. I do not say that there
were not fossil forms quite as big as the gigantic calamaries of
our own time—on the contrary, I believe there were; but if we
go by the record alone we must confess that, in the matter of
invertebrates at least, the balance of size is all in favor of our
own period.
The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the shape of
fishes, towards the close of the Silurian period, the second of
the great geological epochs. The earliest fish appear to have
been small, elongated, eel-like creatures, closely resembling the
lampreys in structure; but they rapidly developed in size and
variety, and soon became the ruling race in the waters of the
ocean, where they maintained their supremacy till the rise of
the great secondary saurians. Even then, in spite of the severe
competition thus introduced, and still later, in spite of the
struggle for life against the huge modern cetaceans (the true
monarchs of the recent seas), the sharks continued to hold their
own as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day
their largest types probably rank second only to the whales in
the whole range of animated nature. There seems no reason to
doubt that modern fish, as a whole, quite equal in size the
piscine fauna of any previous geological age.
It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate group,
the amphibians, represented in our own world only by the frogs,
the toads, the newts, and the axolotls. Here we must certainly
with shame confess that the amphibians of old greatly
surpassed their degenerate descendants in our modern waters.
The Japanese salamander, by far the biggest among our existing
newts, never exceeds a yard in length from snout to tail;
whereas some of the labyrinthodonts (forgive me once more) of
the Carboniferous epoch must have reached at least seven or
eight feet from stem to stern. But the reason of this falling off is
not far to seek. When the adventurous newts and frogs of that
remote period first dropped their gills and hopped about
inquiringly on the dry land, under the shadow of the ancient
tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were the only terrestrial
vertebrates then existing, and they had the field (or, rather, the
forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like all
dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth at their
ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big as donkeys, and
efts as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts’ content in
the marshy lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small
creatures which they found in undisturbed possession of the
Carboniferous isles. But as ages passed away, and new
improvements were slowly invented and patented by survival of
the fittest in the offices of nature, their own more advanced and
developed descendants, the reptiles and mammals, got the
upper hand with them, and soon lived them down in the
struggle for life, so that this essentially intermediate form is now
almost entirely restricted to its one adapted seat, the pools and
ditches that dry up in summer.
The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest modern
forms are simply nowhere beside the gigantic extinct species.
First appearing on the earth at the very close of the vast
primary periods—in the Permian age—they attained in
secondary times the most colossal proportions, and have
certainly never since been exceeded in size by any later forms
of life in whatever direction. But one must remember that
during the heyday of the great saurians, there were as yet no
birds and no mammals. The place now filled in the ocean by the
whales and grampuses, as well as the place now filled in the
great continents by the elephants, the rhinoceroses, the
hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then filled
exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us
all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal
Palace grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had
their day in the secondary period. The forms into which they
developed were certainly every whit as large as any ever seen
on the surface of this planet, but not, as I have already shown,
appreciably larger than those of the biggest cetaceans known to
science in our own time.
During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and
pterodactyls were playing such pranks before high heaven as
might have made contemporary angels weep, if they took any
notice of saurian morality, a small race of unobserved little
prowlers was growing up in the dense shades of the
neighboring forests which was destined at last to oust the huge
reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the
fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole
planet. In the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in
the shape of tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely
related to the banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the
present day. Throughout the long lapse of the secondary ages,
across the lias, the oolite, the wealden, and the chalk, we find
the mammalian race slowly developing into opossums and
kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and antiquated
continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the time for the
coming contest, increasing constantly in size of brain and
keenness of intelligence, the true mammals were able at last,
towards the close of the secondary ages, to enter the lists
boldly against the gigantic saurians. With the dawn of the
tertiary period, the reign of the reptiles begins to wane, and the
reign of the mammals to set in at last in real earnest. In place
of the ichthyosaurus we get the huge cetaceans; in place of the
dinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place of
the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man
himself.
The history of the great birds has been somewhat more
singular. Unlike the other main vertebrate classes, the birds (as
if on purpose to contradict the proverb) seem never yet to have
had their day. Unfortunately for them, or at least for their
chance of producing colossal species, their evolution went on
side by side, apparently, with that of the still more intelligent
and more powerful mammals; so that wherever the mammalian
type had once firmly established itself, the birds were compelled
to limit their aspirations to a very modest and humble standard.
Terrestrial mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so in
isolated regions such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the birds
had things all their own way. In New Zealand, there are no
indigenous quadrupeds at all; and there the huge moa attained
to dimensions almost equalling those of the giraffe. In
Madagascar, the mammalian life was small and of low grade, so
the gigantic æpyornis became the very biggest of all known
birds. At the same time, these big species acquired their
immense size at the cost of the distinctive birdlike habit of flight.
A flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the
ostriches compete practically with the zebras and antelopes
rather than with the eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In
like manner, when a pigeon found its way to Mauritius, it
developed into the practically wingless dodo; while in the
northern penguins, on their icy perches, the forelimbs have
been gradually modified into swimming organs exactly
analogous to the flippers of the seal.
Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no
representatives of their greatness to future ages? On land at
least that is very probable. Man, diminutive man, who, if he
walked on all fours, would be no bigger than a silly sheep, and
who only partially disguises his native smallness by his acquired
habit of walking erect on what ought to be his hind legs—man
has upset the whole balanced economy of nature, and is
everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great
herbivores, his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his
bananas the fruitful plains which were once laid down in prairie
or scrub-wood. Hence it seems not unlikely that the elephant,
the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the buffalo must go. But
we are still a long way off from that final consummation, even
on dry land; while as for the water, it appears highly probable
that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever came out of it.
Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal of
our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions,
seems far more problematical. The race is now no longer to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong. Brain counts for more than
muscle, and mind has gained the final victory over mere matter.
Goliath of Gath has shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling
gun; as in the fairy tales of old, it is cunning little Jack with his
clever devices who wins the day against the heavy, clumsy,
muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our “Minotaurs” and
“Warriors” that are the real leviathans and behemoths of the
great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing
krakens of the latter-day seas. Instead of developing individually
into huge proportions, the human race tends rather to
aggregate into vast empires, which compete with one another
by means of huge armaments, and invent mitrailleuses and
torpedoes of incredible ferocity for their mutual destruction. The
dragons of the prime that tore each other in their slime have
yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armor-plated turret-ships.
Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern
seas of the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming
geologist of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the
sunken “Captain,” or the plated scales of the “Comte de Grasse,”
firmly embedded in the upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic,
may shake his head in solemn deprecation at the horrid sight,
and thank heaven that such hideous carnivorous creatures no
longer exist in his own day.—Cornhill Magazine.
A DAY OF STORM.
‘Twas a day of storm, for the giant Atlantic, rolling in pride,
Drawn by the full moon, driven by the fierce wind, tide upon
tide.
Flooded our poor little Channel. A hundred anxious eyes
Were watching a breach new broken—when suddenly some one
cries,
“A boat coming in!”—and, rounding the pierhead that hid her
before.
There, sure enough, was a stranger smack, head straight for the
shore.
How will she land, where each wave is a mountain? Too late for
how!
Run up a flag there to show her the right place! She must land
now!

She is close—with a rush on the galloping wavetop—a stand,

As the water sinks from beneath her—her nose just touches the
land.
And then (as rude hands, sacking a city, greedy of prey,
Toss, in some littered chamber, a child’s toy lightly away),
A great wave rose from behind, and lifting her, towered, and
broke,
And flung her headlong, down on the hard beach, close to the
folk.
Crash!... But ’tis only her bowsprit gone—she is saved somehow
And a cheer broke out, for a hundred hands have hold of her
now.
And they say ’twas her bowsprit saved her, or she must have
gone over then;
Her bowsprit it was that saved her; and little they think, those
men,
Of one weak woman that prayed, as she watched them
tempest-driven!
They say ’twas her bowsprit saved her! I say, ’twas that prayer,
and Heaven!
—The Spectator.
 SOME TURKISH PROVERBS.
If the Turk has been qualified as “unspeakable,” he is very far
from being inarticulate. Strange as it may seem to those who
have formed their opinion of him from hearsay, it is not the less
true that he is commonly a good conversationalist, and can say
well and pointedly what he has got to say, with a wealth of
illustration in anecdote, quotation, and proverb. The latter form
commends itself especially to the sententious Turkish mind. The
synthetic form of the language, too, secures brevity and
conciseness, and opportunities are afforded for those constant
assonances or rhyming-vowels which are so dear to the
Oriental.
On looking over a note-book containing several hundred Turkish
proverbs, taken down in the course of reading and conversation,
or borrowed from a collection made at the Oriental Academy at
Vienna, the writer has amused himself by grouping them
roughly under certain heads, so as to illustrate some aspects of
the national character and surroundings.
But first it may be interesting to remark how many well-known
English and other European proverbs have their exact
counterpart in Turkish. How far are these to be accounted for by
contact with, or conquest of, Indo-European races? Or has it
been a case of “les beaux esprits se rencontrent”? For instance,
we find “You should not look a gift-horse in the mouth,” in
exactly the same words, as well as “He that is born to be
hanged will never be drowned,” the Turkish version having the
advantage of being expressed in two words! The change of
words is but slight in “Troubled waters suit the fisher,” “One
flower does not make summer,” and “The robe does not make
the dervish;” while in Turkey it is not pot that says to kettle, but
negro to negro, that his face is black. We are disposed to prefer
“The nail saved the shoe, the shoe the horse, the horse the
man, the man the kingdom,” to our somewhat lumbering “For
want of a nail the shoe was lost,” &c. “Wake not the sleeping
dog,” has as a corollary “Step not on the sleeping serpent;” and
we are warned that there is “No rose without a thorn, nor love
without a rival.”
One instance in which our proverbial wisdom is opposed to the
Turkish is to be found in the expression “to kill two birds with
one stone.” The attempt to do this is condemned by sundry
proverbs such as “One arrow does not bring down two birds,”
and “You cannot knock down nine walnuts with one stone.”
Often we are reminded of Scriptural proverbs and aphorisms.
“Nothing unheard of in the world” sounds Solomonian enough;
while “Out with the eye that profits me not,” “The negro does
not whiten with washing,” and “That which thou sowest, that
also shalt thou reap,” are strikingly like New Testament
teaching. Again and again we find expressed in other words
lessons of charity, considerateness, and justice, that would not
be unworthy of a Christian teacher, as, “The stranger’s prayer is
heard;” “The heart’s testimony is stronger than a thousand
witnesses;” “Among the blind, close your eyes;” “In truth is
right;” “Justice is half religion;” “Neighbor’s right, God’s right.”
The heading under which, perhaps, the largest number of
proverbs can be grouped, is that of opportune speech and
silence. If the Turk, as has been said, talks well, he also knows
how to hold his tongue. He looks down with the greatest
contempt on the idle chatterer, and does not even think that
good-manners require him to make small-talk when he has
nothing to say. In fact, when on a visit to a well-bred Turk, with
whom you have no common subjects of interest to discuss,
after exhausting those suggested by politeness—his health, your
own, that of your family, the weather, and the water (a most
interesting topic in the East)—you may safely fall back upon that
golden silence which their proverb, like ours, rates above silver
speech. Hear his comments on the chatterer:—“There is no ass
but brays;” “The dog barks, the caravan passes;” “Fool is he
who alone talks, and is his only listener;” “The fool wears his
heart on his tongue, the wise man keeps his tongue in his
heart;” and “Many words, an unsound heart.” He warns us of
the mischief of evil-speaking,—“The knife’s wound heals, the
tongue’s never;” “The tongue slays more than the sword;” and
“The tongue is boneless, but it breaks bones.” Again, he feels
keenly the danger of free speech under a corrupt and despotic
rule; while he extols honesty and good-faith, and generally
condemns lying. The latter is condoned in certain cases, for
“Some lies are better than truth,” and we may “Lie, but with
measure.” The suppressio veri is even strongly recommended,
for is not the “truth-teller banished out of nine cities?” while “He
who holds his tongue saves his head,” and “There is no better
answer than this, ‘I know not, I saw not.’”
But to turn to something pleasanter, we will quote a few sayings
still familiar in our Turk’s mouth, which have survived the
corruption of the Palace and official Kings, and seem still to
breathe the hardy and independent spirit of the old days, when
courage and enterprise were the only passports to the highest
places in a conquering empire. Then it could be said that “The
horse is to him who mounts, the sword to him who girds it on,”
“The brave man’s word is a coat of mail,” “Fortune is not far
from the brave man’s head,” “The hero is known on the battle-
field,” and “Fear not to-morrow’s mischance.” Who but a
conquering race could have produced such a proverb as “Power
on my head, or the raven on my corpse;” and who can fail to
hear a true ring in “Peasant erect is taller than noble on bended
knee,” or “I am the slave of him who regards me; the king of
him who disregards me?”
Almsgiving is creditable, for “The hand which gives is above that
which takes;” and it offers temporal advantages as well as
spiritual. In this world “No one cuts the hand that gives,” and
“What thou givest that shalt thou take with thee” [to the next].
But beware of accepting alms or favors if you would keep your
self-respect, and “Accept the largess of thy friend as if thou wert
an enemy.”
Great is the power of wealth; “Even the mountains fear the rich
man.” It covers a multitude of failings, and averts many ills. “If a
man’s money is white, no matter if his face be black.” “The knife
cuts not hand of gold.” But then the disadvantages and dangers
of it in a land where empty treasuries are filled by the
suppression of a few rich men, and the confiscation of their
property! Truly the vacuus viator has the better part where
brigands swarm. “Not even a thousand men in armor can strip a
naked man.” Our Turk is a man of few wants,—pilaff, coffee, and
tobacco are enough for him, and so he will rest contented in the
“Health that is better than fortune,” sagely reflecting that “A big
head has a big ache,” that “He who has many vineyards has
many cares,” and congratulating himself if he can say, “My
money is little, my head without strife.” He is not likely to make
a fortune in business, being destitute of the enterprise, as well
as of the sharpness and hardness, necessary to success. “The
bazaar knows neither father nor mother,” and our easy-going
friend has a great regard for these domestic ties. Besides, his
religion forbids him either to speculate or to put out money at
interest, although he sometimes avoids this prohibition by the
clumsy expedient of a fictitious sale, or a “present” taken by the
lender.
It is a pity that his rulers should not have profited by his
experiences of debt. “Poor without debts is better than Prince,”
“A thousand cares do not pay one debt,” and “Creditors have
better memories than debtors,” are explicit enough, but,
perhaps, were not supposed to apply to Government loans.
We find some sound advice on the subject of friendship. Do not
expect your friend to be a paragon,—“Who seeks a faultless
friend, rests friendless.” But when you have found him, keep
him,—“Old friend, old bath,” you will do better to change
neither; and if he is “a true friend, he is better than a relation.”
On the other hand, avoid the British error of underrating your
foe; he is always dangerous. “Water sleeps, the enemy wakes,”
and “Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant,” for “A
thousand friends are few, one foe many.”
The references to woman are as ungallant as they are unjust.
She is to be treated as a child, and as such contemptuously
pardoned for her shortcomings. “You should lecture neither child
nor woman;” it would be waste of time. Her intelligence, too, is
underrated, “her hair is long, her wits short!” It is she who as a
mother “makes the house, and mars it,” and she is classed with
good wine as “a sweet poison.” But it must be admitted that in
this want of gallantry the Turk is far surpassed by the Persian,
who says “The dog is faithful, woman never.”
The lover is regarded as a lunatic, unfit for the society of his
fellows. “If you are in love, fly to the mountains,” for “Lover and
king brook no companion.” He is “blind,” and distance is nothing
to him; for him, “Bagdad is not far,” and the only cures for his
malady are “travel and patience.”
A word of advice to those about to marry. “Marry below you, but
do not marry your daughter above you;” and “Choose cloth by
its edge, and a wife by her mother.” It is natural that we should
find many references to that submission which is at the root of
Islam. Sometimes we find the idea without reference to the
Deity, as in the cases, “When fate comes the eye of wisdom is
blind,” “No one eats another’s destined portion,” and “What will
come, will come, willy nilly;” but more often he is directly
invoked. His will is fate, “Whom he slays not, man slays not,”
“Who calls on Him is not abandoned,” “He delays, but neglects
not,” provides for the helpless and “builds the blind bird’s nest;”
and so we should address ourselves to Him, “asking God for
what we want, not his servant.” If you apply to the latter, you
may be disappointed. Even the minister of religion is chary of
his assistance. “Food from the Imam’s house, tears from the
dead man’s eye,”—you are as likely to get one as the other.
Sometimes, too, we meet with a small touch of scepticism, as
when we are told, “First tie-up your donkey, then recommend
him to God;” and sometimes a cry of black despair, “Happiest he
who dies in the cradle.”
Let us conclude this hasty sketch with a few miscellaneous
proverbs, remarkable for point or picturesqueness. “The fish
stinks from the head” is often quoted in these days of Ottoman
decay, in allusion to the bad example which comes from above.
We have heard the incapacity for action which is engendered in
Turkish rulers by the enforced seclusion of their youth
commented on with “Who stays at home, loses his cap in the
crowd.” The difficulties of equality,—“You are master, and I am
master; who will groom the horse?” On an impostor,—“The
empty sack won’t stand upright.” “Qui trop embrasse, mal
étreint,” is rendered by “Two water-melons won’t fit under one
arm.” “Old brooms are thrown on the roof,” may be taken to
apply to the promotion of superannuated fogies. Your hangers-
on profit by your success,—“When you climb a tree your shoes
go up too.” The higher you are the worse you fall, for “There is
a cure for him who falls from horse or donkey-back, but a pick-
axe (to dig his grave) for him who falls from a camel.” Let us
hope that this proverb, in its literal sense, may never be justified
in the persons of our gallant Camel Corps in the Soudan. Three
proverbs on the donkey, exemplifying—the useful guest, “They
asked the donkey to the wedding, water or wood was wanting;”
the power of hope, “Die not, my donkey; summer is coming and
clover will grow;” and the folly of exposing oneself to needless
criticism, “Don’t cut your donkey’s tail in public; some will say,
‘It is too long;’ others, ‘It is too short.’” And, lastly, as an
instance in which the jingle of the original may be reproduced in
English,—“The mannerly man learns manners of the
mannerless.”—The Spectator.
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