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 torpedos of incredible ferocity for their mutual
destruction. The dragons of the prime that tare each other in their
slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armour-plated
turret-ships. Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern
seas of the secondary saurians.
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