It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living
fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the
fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been
beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;
in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last
relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.
A VERY OLD MASTER
The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good
deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his
own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of
the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than
the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the
mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British
Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled
eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors
carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair,
just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already
hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the
morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,
already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in
the Dordogne.
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