“And now I knew, as I proceeded onwards, that big game was at hand. Small Deinosaurs, no larger than kangaroos, hopped freely round me, but I reserved my fire, suspecting that I might need it at any moment. My companion had long since completely lost his nerve. Of him it might be said that he was out of harmony with his environment. He figured there merely as a fragment of nourishment for something bigger than himself, and realising this he presently jumped to my shoulder, evidently determined that, if worse came to worst, we would die together. “Every moment increased the size of the fauna. Presently an armoured Deinosaur--Scelidosaurus by name--put his head out of a ten-foot patch of rushes. He had plates and spines on his monstrous back and a hungry look in his saucer-like eye. The beast, fortunately, did not see us, and feeling now that it would not be well to shoot save in the event of necessity, I stopped quietly where I was till the creature went crashing into the water. Then I visited its lair and was able to solve a problem no palæontologist has ever yet decided. I found a Deinosaur’s nest with four eggs in it and thereby set a great question at rest for ever. Deinosaurs certainly laid eggs. These in question were froglike in texture, but separate each from the other and somewhat larger than big pumpkins. Having noted so much, I heard the mother Deinosaur returning, and hurriedly withdrew, not caring to risk any difference with a creature twelve feet high, covered with armour-plating and full of maternal instinct. “Hereabout I may note in passing that my black tom at last found something smaller than himself--a hopping Deinosaur not much bigger than a rat. This he destroyed in triumph and partially ate--feeling the better and braver for doing so. “Of course, I proposed to shoot one of these ‘dragons of the prime’ presently. Only I wanted a big specimen, if possible. I was too late for Anchisaurus--a giant whose footprints and tail-marks have been observed in the New Red Sandstone strata--and too early for Claosaurus, whose simple custom it was to eat off the tops of palms and tree-ferns in Cretaceous times; but I knew that those flesh-eating colossi, the Ceratosaurs, might lurk round any corner; I knew they had horns on their foreheads and took twenty feet of ground at a stride; that their footmark habitually covered a square yard of earth. These reflections made me cautious, and even nervous. Then again I remembered your fearsome Stegosaur, who also shone in Jurassic days. He was wont to take the air upon all fours; Nature had provided him with plates and spikes, a massive frame about thirty feet long, and two sets of brains; one in his head, the other in the region of his tail.