CHAPTER XI.
A LIE, ZOOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED.
We stand agape in the British Museum, looking at the monstrous skeletons of the mastodon, megatherium and iguanodon, and conclude that all the great animals thirty feet long and eleven feet high are extinct.
Now, while we do not want to frighten children or disturb nervous people, we have to say that the other day we caught a glimpse of a monster beside which the lizards of the saurian era were short, and the elephants of the mammalian period were insignificant.

We saw it in full spring, and on the track of its prey.

Children would call the creature "a fib;" rough persons would term it "a whopper;" polite folks would say it was "a fabrication;" but plain and unscientific people would style it "a lie." Naturalists might assign it to the species "Tigris regalis," or "Felis pardus." We do not think that anatomical and zoological justice has been done to the lie.

It is to be found in all zones.

Livingstone saw it in Central Africa; Dr.Kane found it on an iceberg beside a polar bear; Agassiz discovered it in Brazil.