On first considering the question of the origin of the rat-goat of Majorca, some naturalists will, no doubt, be tempted to suggest that it is a case of a sudden "sport," a "mutation" as they now call it, and not a result of gradual slowly developed reduction of the now lost teeth and correspondingly gradual enlargement of the two middle ones, taking many thousand generations to bring about. The fact that the rat-goat is found on an island cut off from competition with other animals will favour this view. On the other hand, there is the important and really remarkable fact that familiar as man has been for ages with Ruminants of many kinds--such as sheep, goats, cattle, deer--there is absolutely no case on record of an "oddity" or "monstrosity" resembling the rat-goat's condition occurring in the teeth of any of the hundreds of thousands of these animals killed and eaten by man, and therefore closely examined. Professor Bateson, who a few years ago ransacked the museums of Europe for instances of "discontinuous variation," or "sports," and wrote a valuable book on the subject, did not discover any example of the kind. Apart from the view, which is very generally held, that such sudden "mutations" as "rat-teeth in a ruminant" are--even should they occur--not perpetuated, we are not really in any way driven to suppose that the rat-goat of Majorca originated in that island. It is true that we know nothing like it in the Pliocene and Miocene of the Mediterranean region which could have been its immediate ancestor. But probably the ancestors of the rat-goat were slowly developed from a Miocene sheath-horned ruminant, a primitive sort of antelope in some part of North-west Africa, or in an extension of it now submerged in the Atlantic, and stragglers of this curious and now lost Ruminant stock were left in Majorca when in Miocene or early Pliocene times that island became detached from its Hispano-African connection. CHAPTER VIII VEGETARIANS AND THEIR TEETH