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 author's 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.