is much more to be said on the side of its being an oligarchy.
Thus in the beginning of days all power was in the hands of the Titans, the mammoths and the mastodons of antiquity; but in time a more vigorous race of beasts was gradually developed, and the Saturn and Tellus, Ops and Typhon, of the primeval earth were one by one unseated and dispossessed of power by the younger creatures, — the eagles of Jupiter and the tigers of Bacchus, the serpents of Athene and the wolves of Mars.
The elder rulers of the wild world accepted at their hands the dignity of extinction; and instead of a few behemoths, lording it over the vast commonwealth of the earth, there were developed many nations of lesser things, divided into their tribes and clans, and transacting, each within their own countries, all the duties of life, exercising the high functions of authority, and carrying on the work of an orderly world.
On land, the tiger and the lion, the python, the polar bear and the grizzly, gradually rose to the acknowledged dignity of crowned heads. In the air there was the royal condor and the eagle, with a peerage of falcons. In the mysterious empire of the sea there was but one supreme authority, the sea-serpent, with its terrible lieutenants, the octopus and the devil-fish.
Yet none of these are absolute autocrats beyond the immediate territory they reside in. They have all to pay in vexed boundaries the penalty of extended dominion. Thus, though the tiger may be supreme in the jungles of the Himalayan Terai, he finds upon his wild Naga frontier the irreconcilable rhinoceros, and in the fierce Guzerati country there is the maneless lion. Up
