With the Ordovician, caudalization reached its climax and the fashion swept all over the world. It is shown not so much in the proportion of families with large pygidia, as in the very great development of the particular trilobites so equipped. Asaphidæ and Illænidæ were then dominant, and the Proëtidæ, Cyclopygidæ Goldiidæ, and Lichadidæ had begun their existence. A similar story is told by the Silurian record, except that the burden of the Asaphidæ has been transferred to the Lichadidæ and Goldiidæ. All the really old (Cambrian) families of trilobites with small pygidia had now disappeared. In the general dwindling of the subclass through the Devonian and later Palæozoic, the few surviving species with small pygidia were the first to go, and the proëtids with large abdominal shields the last. The explanation of this history is probably to be found in the rise of the predatory cephalopods and fishes, the natural enemies of the trilobites, against whom they could have no other protection than their agility in escaping. While the records at present known carry the fishes back only so far as the Ordovician (fishes may have arisen in fresh waters and have gone to sea in a limited way in the Ordovician and more so in Silurian time) and the cephalopods to the Upper Cambrian, the rise of the latter must have begun at an earlier date, and it is probably no more than fair to conjecture that the attempt to escape swimming enemies caused an increase in the swimming powers of the trilobites themselves. At any rate, the time of the great development of the straight cephalopods coincided with the time of greatest development of caudalization; both were initiated in the Pacific realm, and both spread throughout the marine world during the middle Ordovician. And since, in the asaphids, a decrease in swimming power of the appendages accompanied the increase in the size of the pygidium, it seems probable that the swimming function of the one had been transferred to the other. A high-speed, erratic motion which could be produced by the sudden flap of a pygidium would be of more service in escape than any amount of steady swiftness produced by the oar-like appendages of an animal of the shape of a trilobite. _Coxopodites._