The Living Past
High above the roof of the Amazonian rainforest, Professor Challenger sees something that eerily reminds him of home.
1912
High above the roof of the Amazonian rainforest, Professor Challenger sees something that eerily reminds him of home.
1912
High on a remote plateau amidst the Brazilian rainforest, Edward Malone, Professor Challenger and their party of explorers come across fresh, oozing prints in the mud. Lord John Roxton sees three toes and thinks ‘bird’, but the sight reminds Professor Challenger of Sussex — and quite a different creature.
abridged
“BY George, this must be the trail of the father of all birds!”
If it were indeed a bird — and what animal could leave such a mark? — its foot was so much larger than an ostrich’s that its height upon the same scale must be enormous. Lord John looked eagerly round him and slipped two cartridges into his elephant-gun.
“But what do you make of this?” cried Professor Summerlee, triumphantly, pointing to what looked like the huge print of a five-fingered human hand appearing among the three-toed marks.
“Wealden!” cried Challenger, in an ecstasy. “I’ve seen them in the Wealden clay.* It is a creature walking erect upon three-toed feet, and occasionally putting one of its five-fingered forepaws upon the ground. Not a bird, my dear Roxton — not a bird.”
“A beast?”
“No; a reptile — a dinosaur. Nothing else could have left such a track. They puzzled a worthy Sussex doctor some ninety years ago;* but who in the world could have hoped — hoped — to have seen a sight like that?”
abridged
The discovery of three-toed, five-fingered prints in the clay at Crowborough in Sussex (in an area known as The Weald) caused a stir in 1909, and caught Conan Doyle’s imagination. They belonged to the Iguanodon (pictured above), first discovered in a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium, in 1878.
Obstetrician Dr Gideon Mantell (1790-1852). However, the fossil fragments for which he coined the name ‘Iguanodon’ in the 1820s are now called ‘Therosaurus’. ‘Iguanodon’ had come to be used so indiscriminately that the classification was broken up, and in the reallocations Mantell’s specimen was stripped of the name he had invented.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What prompted Lord John to load his elephant-gun?
The idea of bagging an enormous ostrich.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Lord John saw animal tracks. The animal seemed extremely large. Lord John loaded his gun at once.