We admire the ingenious imagination of Swift, and essayists dwell upon his happy conceits and upon the ability with which, in his celebrated work, he has ordered all things to harmonise in dimensions with the enlarged and reduced scales on which he has conceived the men and animals of Brobdignag and Lilliput. So much even has this quaint idea been appreciated, that his story has achieved a small immortality, and proved one of the numerous springs from which new words have been imported into our language. Yet the peculiar and essential singularities of the story are quite equalled, or even surpassed, by creatures which are, or have been, found in nature. The imaginary diminutive cows which Gulliver brought back from Lilliput, and placed in the meadows at Dulwich, are not one bit more remarkable, in respect to relative size, than the pigmy elephant (_E. Falconeri_) whose remains have been found in the cave-deposits of Malta, associated with those of pigmy hippopotami, and which was only two feet six inches high; or the still existing _Hippopotamus (Chæropsis) liberiensis_, which M. Milne Edwardes[26] figures as little more than two feet in height. The lilliputian forests from which the royal navy was constructed contained even large trees in comparison with the dwarf oaks of Mexico,[27] or with the allied, even smaller species, which crawls like heather about the hill-slopes of China and Japan, and still more so in comparison with that singular pine, the most diminutive known (_Dacrydium taxifolium_), fruiting specimens of which, according to Kirk, are sometimes only two inches high, while the average height is only six to ten inches; while even among the forests of Brobdignag, a very respectable position could be held by the mammoth trees of California (_Sequoia gigantea_), or by the loftier white gums of Australia (_Eucalyptus amygdalina_), which occasionally reach, according to Von Mueller,[28] the enormous height of 480 feet. Nor could more adequate tenants (in point of size) be found to occupy them than the gigantic reptilian forms lately discovered by Marsh among the deposits of Colorado and Texas. Surely a profound acquaintance with the different branches of natural history should render a man credulous rather than incredulous, for there is hardly conceivable a creature so monstrous that it may not be paralleled by existing ones in every-day life.[29] [Illustration: FIG. 2.--PTERODACTYLUS. (_After Figuier._)] [Illustration: FIG. 3.--RHAMPHORYNCHUS. (_From "Nature."_)]