Ogga had made his way through that endless wood, the witness in the skies and earth of many marvels. It had arisen in the dateless past, and while with the coming and the going years its leaves had sprouted and ripened and fallen, their shade had screened a changing animal world. Those intangible unknown processes of alteration, which by the subtlety of their influence upon the plants themselves evoked also responses in the creature of the mountain and the plain, were replacing an old fauna by a newer one. And Ogga was about to discover a relic of a passing race. The sun had moved behind the mountain crests and the narrow valley, faintly deepening into a verdant crease, like the enrichment of a deeper colored border to a fabric, which passed on its further side, was traversed by a stream. Towards this the prehistoric turned, crossing the grass inundated field, bare of trees, in the ashen gold of the falling day.
There was opposite to the place where Ogga had emerged from the wood a clump of low ginko trees. These strange plants, living to-day and in Asia, were barely surviving from the tertiaries in the glacial age, while their antecedent rise was far off in the mesozoic, in the vast periods of reptilian abundance. It was Lagk’s description of this spot and the singular fan-leafed trees which made Ogga certain that he had reached the position where the new creature Lagk had run upon was to be found.
As Ogga came nearer to the peculiar trees, their scarcity and thinness of foliage, united with the whorl-like arrangement of their branches, permitted him to see distinctly the animal novelty which Lagk had urged him to pursue.
It had evidently remained at the very place in which it was discovered, and its strangeness, its whimsical union of grotesque deformity and awkwardness with mere physical mass, caused the hunter to stop in amazement, sinking slowly to the ground in the tall grass, and stalking stealthily towards the unusual object. It was engaged in feeding. For this purpose it had raised itself upon its hind legs and had stretched its long forearms upward, distending their length to the utmost to reach the high twigs. It afforded Ogga a complete display of its strange proportions, and the young savage remained motionless, puzzled and astonished.