They find out in Wyoming, also, the bones of another creature that has been called “the father of cats”—Patriofelis as they say it in Latin. But the father of cats is also a great deal like a seal, and something like an otter—at least he used to take readily to the water, as our modern cats certainly do not.

In short, if any of us had lived in North America at a time not so very long before the first human beings actually did live somewhere on the earth, we should be surely put to it to tell one sort of beast from another. The horses looked like dogs, and the dogs looked like cats, and the cats looked like seals, and there were pigs that looked like wolves, and camels that suggested sheep, to say nothing of cows that you couldn’t tell from deer. Each beast used to be a general mixture of all beasts, and only since there have been men in the world have the beasts changed into all the various sorts which we know.

[ Extinct Reptiles, which looked like a mixture of Alligator, Rhinoceros and Kangaroo, but their Bones were more like the Bones of Birds. ]

The snakes used to have legs. In fact, a snake is not much more than a lizard that has left off his legs for the sake of crawling into smaller holes. But the snakes and lizards are much older than the beasts; so that there were plenty of both in the world long before there were horses and cows and dogs and cats and all the rest of the beasts with fur—and still longer, naturally, before there were any elephants or men.

The early birds, too, were a good deal like lizards. They had teeth like a crocodile, and long tails with feathers stuck in the sides, and tho they had wings like a proper bird, they had also claws on their wings, which were really three-fingered hands with feathers growing on them. But even our modern birds still keep the old lizard scales on their legs, tho they have long ago changed them to feathers on their bodies.

It is exactly the same with our own ancestors as with the ancestors of any beast or bird or reptile. The bones of early men are still found in the caves of Europe, mixed with the bones of the animals which they ate, and buried in the earth and stone that have fallen from the roof. These men were true and proper human beings, who walked on their hind legs and, I suppose, talked. But they were not quite such men as we are, for their skulls were a little flatter on top, the bony ridges over their eyes were a little heavier and their teeth a little larger.

These ancient men, like nearly all Indians before White Men came, and for that matter, like our own prehistoric ancestors in Europe, had no metal tools, and used only stone for hammers, axes, and arrowheads. So there are found, all over Europe, vast numbers of stone tools and weapons, cruder as they are older, until the very earliest are only common pebbles that have been banged by use.

No skeletons are known of these early men, but only skulls, commonly a good deal broken. So we do not know very much about these people. But for the most part the hollow in the brain-case is just a trifle larger over the left ear, as if even they had a speech center, were right-handed, and could talk.

On the other hand, some very ancient apes had skulls and teeth more like ours than any modern gorilla or chimpanzee ever has. So it seems to be a general rule that, just as young animals and plants tend to be more like one another than they will be when they grow up, so very ancient creatures tend to be less unlike each other than their present-day descendants are.