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The gigantic Chelonians which once abounded in India and the Indian seas are now entirely extinct; but we have had little difficulty in believing the accounts of their actual and late existence contained in the works of Pliny and Ælian since the discovery of the Colossochelys, described by Dr. Falconer, in the Upper Miocene deposits of the Siwalik Hills in North-Western India. The shell of Colossochelys Atlas (Falconer and Cautley) measured twelve feet, and the whole animal nearly twenty.
Pliny,66 who published his work on Natural History about A.D. 77, states that the turtles of the Indian Sea are of such vast size that a single shell is sufficient to roof a habitable cottage, and that among the islands of the Red Sea the navigation is mostly carried on in boats formed from this shell.
Ælian,67 about the middle of the third century of our era, is more specific in his statement, and says that the Indian river-tortoise is very large, and in size not less than a boat of fair magnitude; also, in speaking of the Great Sea, in which is Taprobana (Ceylon), he says: “There are very large tortoises generated in this sea, the shell of which is large enough to make an entire roof; for a single one reaches the length of fifteen cubits, so that not a few people are able to live beneath it, and certainly secure themselves from the vehement rays of the sun; they make a broad shade, and so resist rain that they are preferable for this purpose to tiles, nor does the rain beating against them sound otherwise than if it were falling on tiles. Nor, indeed, do those who inhabit them have any necessity for repairing them, as in the case of broken tiles, for the whole roof is made out of a solid shell so that it has the appearance of a cavernous or undermined rock, and of a natural roof.”
El Edrisi, in his great geographical work,68 completed A.D. 1154, speaks of them as existing down to his day, but as his book is admitted to be a compilation from all preceding geographical works, he may have been simply quoting, without special acknowledgment, the statements given above. He says, speaking of the Sea of Herkend (the Indian Ocean west of Ceylon), “It contains turtles twenty cubits long, containing within them as many as one thousand eggs.” Large tortoises formerly inhabited the Mascarene islands, but have been destroyed on all of them, with the exception of the small uninhabited Aldabra islands, north of the Seychelle group; and those formerly abundant on the Galapagos islands are now represented by only a few survivors, and the species rapidly approaches extinction.
I shall close this chapter with a reference to a creature which, if it may not be entitled to be called “the dragon,” may at least be considered as first cousin to it. This is a lacertilian of large size, at least twenty feet in length, panoplied with the most horrifying armour, which roamed over the Australian continent during Pleistocene times, and probably until the introduction of the aborigines.
Its remains have been described by Professor Owen in several communications to the Royal Society,69 under the name of Megalania prisca. They were procured by Mr. G. F. Bennett from the drift-beds of King’s Creek, a tributary of the Condamine River in Australia. It was associated with correspondingly large marsupial mammals, now also extinct.
From the portions transmitted to him Professor Owen determined that it presented in some respects a magnified resemblance of the miniature existing lizard, Moloch horridus, found in Western Australia,70 of which Dr. Gray remarks, “The external appearance of this lizard is the most ferocious of any that I know.” In Megalania the head was rendered horrible and menacing by horns projecting from its sides, and from the tip of the nose, which would be “as available against the attacks of Thylacoleo as the buffalo’s horns are against those of the South African lion.” The tail consisted of a series of annular segments armed with horny spikes, represented by the less perfectly developed ones in the existing species Uromastix princeps from Zanzibar, or in the above-mentioned moloch. In regard to these the Professor says, “That the horny sheaths of the above-described supports or cores arming the end of the tail may have been applied to deliver blows upon an assailant, seems not improbable, and this part of the organization of the great extinct Australian dragon may be regarded, with the cranial horn, as parts of both an offensive and defensive apparatus.”
The gavial of the Ganges is reported to be a fish-eater only, and is considered harmless to man. The Indian museums, however, have large specimens, which are said to have been captured after they had destroyed several human beings; and so we may imagine that this structurally herbivorous lizard (the Megalania having a horny edentate upper jaw) may have occasionally varied his diet, and have proved an importunate neighbour to aboriginal encampments in which toothsome children abounded, and that it may, in fact, have been one of the sources from which the myth of the Bunyip, of which I shall speak hereafter, has been derived.
CHAPTER III.
ANTIQUITY OF MAN
I do not propose to bestow any large amount of space upon the enumeration of the palæontological evidence of the antiquity of man. The works of the various eminent authors who have devoted themselves to the special consideration of this subject exhaust all that can be said upon it with our present data, and to these I must refer the reader who is desirous of acquainting himself critically with its details, confining myself to a few general statements based on these labours.
In the early days of geological science when observers were few, great groups of strata were arranged under an artificial classification, which, while it has lost to a certain extent the specific value which it then assumed to possess, is still retained for purposes of convenient reference. Masters of the science acquired, so to say, a possessive interest in certain regions of it, and the names of Sedgwick, Murchison, Jukes, Phillips, Lyell, and others became, and will remain, inseparably associated with the history of those great divisions of the materials of the earth’s crust, which, under the names of the Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Tertiary formations, have become familiar to us.
In those days, when observations were limited to a comparatively small area, the lines separating most of these formations were supposed to be hard and definite; forms of life which characterized one, were presumed to have become entirely extinct before the inauguration of those which succeeded them, and breaks in the stratigraphical succession appeared to justify the opinion, held by a large and influential section, that great cataclysms or catastrophes had marked the time when one age or formation terminated and another commenced to succeed it.
By degrees, and with the increase of observers, both in England and in every portion of the world, modifications of these views obtained; passage beds were discovered, connecting by insensible gradations formations which had hitherto been supposed to present the most abrupt separations; transitional forms of life connecting them were unearthed; and an opinion was advanced, and steadily confirmed, which at the present day it is probable no one would be found to dispute, that not all in one place or country, but discoverable in some part or other of the world, a perfect sequence exists, from the very earliest formations of which we have any cognizance, up to the alluvial and marine deposits in process of formation at the present day.71
Correlatively it was deduced that the same phenomena of nature have been in action since the earliest period when organic existence can be affirmed. The gradual degradation of pre-existing continents by normal destructive agencies, the upheaval and subsidence of large areas, the effusion from volcanic vents, into the air or sea, of ashes and lavas, the action of frost and ice, of heat, rain, and sunshine – all these have acted in the past as they are still acting before our eyes.
In
“Intercourse of China with Eastern Turkestan and the adjacent country in the second century B.C.,” T. W. Kingsmill,
Description of some New Species and Genera of Reptiles from Western Australia, discovered by John Gould, Esq.,
“We shall, I think, eventually more fully recognise that, as is the case with the periods of the day, each of the larger geological divisions follows the other, without any actual break or boundary; and that the minor subdivisions are like the hours on the clock, useful and conventional rather than absolutely fixed by any general cause in Nature.” – Annual Address, President of Geological Society, 1875.
“With regard to stratigraphical geology, the main foundations are already laid, and a great part of the details filled in. The tendency of modern discoveries has already been, and will probably still be, to fill up those breaks, which, according to the view of many, though by no means all geologists, are so frequently assumed to exist between different geological periods and to bring about a more full recognition of the continuity of geological time. As knowledge increases, it will, I think, become more and more apparent that all existing divisions of time are to a considerable extent local and arbitrary. But, even when this is fully recognised, it will still be found desirable to retain them, if only for the sake of convenience and approximate precision.” – Annual Address, President of Geological Society, 1876.