For, though the mills of God grind slowly, the cosmic process was aiming at something better than egoism and dinosaurs, and at some time during the long period of the Chalk deposits there began the tremendous world-wide rivalry between these dragons and the rising class of warm-blooded viviparous mammals which had hitherto played an insignificant part in the world. The very name of this class of animals is taken from the function of motherhood. The offspring of these "mammas" come into the world as recognizable personalities, so far developed that the relation between mother and child begins as a relation of personal affection. The new-born mammal is not an egg nor a caterpillar, but a baby, and the baby's dawning consciousness opens up a narrow horizon of sympathy and tenderness, a horizon of which the expansion shall in due course of ages reveal a new heaven and a new earth. At first the nascent altruism was crude enough, but it must have sufficed to make mutual understanding and cooperation more possible than before; it thus contributed to the advancement of mammalian intelligence, and prepared the way for gregariousness, by and by to culminate in sociality, as already described. In the history of creation the mammals were moderns, equipped with more effective means of ensuring survival than their oviparous antagonists. The development of complete mammality was no sudden thing. Some of the dinosaurs may have been ovoviviparous, like some modern serpents. The Australian duck-bill, a relic of the most ancient incipient mammality, is still oviparous; the opossum and kangaroo preserve the record of a stage when viviparousness was but partially achieved; but with the advent of the placental mammals the break with the old order of things was complete. The results of the struggle are registered in the Eocene rocks. The ancient world had found its Waterloo. Gone were the dragons who so long had lorded it over both hemispheres,--brontosaurs, iguanodons, plesiosaurs, lælaps, pterodactyls,--all gone; their uncouth brood quite vanished from the earth, and nothing left alive as a reminder, save a few degenerate collateral kin, such as snakes and crocodiles, objects of dread and loathing to higher creatures. Never in the history of our planet has there been a more sweeping victory than that of the mammals, nor has Nature had any further occasion for victories of that sort. The mammal remains the highest type of animal existence, and subsequent progress has been shown in the perfecting of that type where most perfectible. [Illustration] XII _The Omnipresent Ethical Trend_