Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 17.djvu/61

* REPTILE. •io REPUBLIC. great agility. The only braiieh of the class that seems to be prosperous is that of the snakes, whose peculiar form, adaptive qualities, and excellent endowments for escai)e or defense enable them to fill a peculiar and little-contested place in the economy of the world. Fossil Forms. The living reptiles are com- paratively insignificant survivors of a mighty race, whose first appearance antedates the Per- mian period, since remains of two widely dis- simihir groups occur in I'ermian rocks in Eu- rope. Xorth America, and South Africa. First becoming abundant in the Triassic, the rise of reptiles is coincident with the decadence of the Stegoccphalia, the great armored amphibians. In the Jurassic the development of reptiles attained its highest level; they dominated land, sea, and air in forms as grotesque as the mythical griffon, drairon. and sca-serpcut. It is noteworthy that the Jlesozoie reptiles paralleled nearly all the adaptations which occurred ages later among the mammals. There were land reptiles of carnivor- ous lialiit, like the cats and wolves, heavy slug- gish animals adapted to vegetable feeding, marine fish-like forms which strongly suggest the whales and porpoises, others which sat erect on the liind legs and tail, in some cases adapted to leaping like the kangaroo, and even 'dragons of the air' with bat-like wings. The supremacy of the reptiles extends into the Cretaceous with scarcely any diminution; in fact, it is liere that several orders reach their culminating point; but toward the end of this period the dynasty of reptiles comes to an end, and at the dawn of the Eocene the mammals, which during the Jlesozoic were extremely insignificant, become the reigning type. Geographically, the reptilian fauna of the Jlesozoic period was almost cosmopolitan, al- though the contemporary faunas of widely sep- arated regions sunietimes show considerable dis- similarity. This variation may be due to differ- ent climatic conditions, or to causes which pre- vent migration of animals. Regarding the gen- eral geological distribution of reptiles, it may be stated that the Karoo formations (chiefly Lower Triassic) of South Africa have yielded the anomodont land reptiles in remarkable num- bers and diversity of form, while the Middle Trias and the .Jurassic of Europe are especially rich in marine foi-ms. Above the Triassic no land- reptiles are known for the Southern Hemisphere, the anomodonts having liecome extinct, but the northern continents, and especially Xorth Amer- ica, witnessed during the Jurassic and Creta- ceous the development to gigantic size of ich- thyosaurs, plesiosaurs. turtles, and especially dinosaurs. The pterodactyls attain huge pro- portions in the American Cretaceous, and here for the first time appear the great sea-lizards or niosasaurs. It is certain that the true lizards, and probably snakes, existed in the Cretaceous, but as yet only a few doubtful remains have been discovered below the Eocene. None of the rep- tilian orders except those which e.xist at the present survived the Cretaceous, and the be- ginning of the Eocene witnessed a reptilian fauna essentially similar to that of to-day. The origin of reptiles from stegocephalian Amphibia cannot be doubted: and as the earliest known reptile, pahrohatteria, from the Lower Permian of Saxony, is already well differentiated from its stegocephalian contemporaries, it seems lirobable that rcjitiles existed as early as the Upper Carboniferous. Some of the Microsauria, a sub-order of stcgocephalians, are ranked by Cadow as reptiles. It is not improbable that the reptiles arose dipliylctically, or in two parallel lines, from the -mpliibia, and as far back as the Permian we find (lie widely divergent stems of the two great divisions of the order. t)f late years the diphylelie character of the class has been noted by several writers, but it was not until 1902 that the two branches of reptilian descent were clearly dili'erentiated by Osborn as sub-classes, under the names Symipsidii and Diapsida. These names refer to the condition of the temporal region of the skull — whether primitively a single temporal arch, or separate upjier and lower arches. See special articles elsewhere in this work under the names of groups above nieniioned, as DlXOS-iURIA, ICHTHYOSAVRUS, TtIEROMOUPII.X, etc. BiBLiOGR.PiiY. Dumeril et Bibron, Erpctulogie generale (Paris, 54) ; Holi'man, "Keptilia," in Bronn's Klanaen und Ordnmirjcn dex Thiernichs (Berlin, 1850 — ) ; Boulenger, Catalogue of Hep- liles i>i the British Uuseum (London, 18S9-!)0) ; Cope, C'rocodilians, Lizards, and iS'nakcs (Smith- sonian Institution, Washington, 1900) : llolbrook, Xorth American IJcrpetologn (Philadelphia, 1842): Gadow, AmpliiJiia und Reptiles ( Xcw York, 1901). Consult also authorities cited un- der Crocodile, Lizard, Sx.ke. Turtle, etc., and faunal and general works, especially Parker and Haswell, Te-xt-Book of Zooloyi/ {'Sevi York, 1897). For fossil forms, consult: Zittel, Text Book of Paleontology, pt. ii. (London, 1903) ; 'ood- ward, I'ertehrale Palaeontology (ib.. 1898); Nicholson and Lydekker, JIanual of PaUremtology (Edinburgh, 1889) ; Lucas, Animals Before Han in North America (ib., 1903). REPUBLIC. A form of political organiza- tion in which the princijial agents of gov- ernment are chosen by qualified electors, to wliom they are, in theory at least, responsible. Such electors may comprise the whole adult popula- tion of the "state, or all qualified male citizens, or a small group of persons exercising a consti- tutional or hereditary power of election. The earlier republics were of the latter sort, ranging from the free but limited democracy of .Athens to the narrow oligarchies which divided the sov- ereignt.v of Italy during the Middle Ages. The democratic movement of the last century has, in the freer political communities of the Western world, largely substituted a popular for an oli- garchical electorate, thus giving to the world re- publics of the type of France and the United States of America, and creating a new but inac- curate definition of republic as synonymous with popular government. See Bemocract. It is not to be denied that there may be a re- public in reality which is not such in name, nor that a government which masquerades under re- publican forms may in fact be a thinly dis- guised monarchy or imperialism. In limiting the term republic to the form of government, we must be understood as speaking of the form through which government is actually admin- istered. A monarchy in which the crown has be- come nierelv the symbol of social distinction and no longer represents political authority may fairly be described as a republic in all but name; while a military autocrae.v. like that of the Caesars, though veiling its assumption of arbi-