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Like the Monogenists, the Polygenists are of several sects; some imagine that their assumed species of mankind were created where we find them the African in Africa, and the Australian in Australia, along with the other animals of their distributional province; others conceive that each species of man has resulted from the modification of some antecedent species of ape the American from the broad-nosed Simians of the New World, the African from the Troglodytic stock, the Mongolian from the Orangs.
And I take refuge in one of two alternatives: either they existed in our own area during the Devonian epoch and we have simply not yet found them; or they formed part of the population of some other distributional province of that day, and only entered our area by migration at the end of the Devonian epoch.
I see nothing whatever against the supposition that distributional provinces of terrestrial life existed in the Devonian epoch, inasmuch as M. Barrande has proved that they existed much earlier.
I see nothing whatever against the supposition that distributional provinces of terrestrial life existed in the Devonian epoch, inasmuch as M. Barrande has proved that they existed much earlier.
Having regard to this general scheme of geological knowledge and thought, it is obvious that geological speculation may be, so to speak, anatomical and developmental speculation, so far as it relates to points of stratigraphical arrangement which are out of reach of direct observation; or, it may be physiological speculation, so far as it relates to undetermined problems relative to the activities of the earth; or, it may be distributional speculation, if it deals with modifications of the earth's place in space; or, finally, it will be ætiological speculation, if it attempts to deduce the history of the world, as a whole, from the known properties of the matter of the earth, in the conditions in which the earth has been placed.
The problem which was to be Darwin's chief subject of occupation for the rest of his life thus presented itself, at first, mainly under its distributional aspect. Why do species present certain relations in space and in time? Why are the animals and plants of the Galapagos Archipelago so like those of South America and yet different from them?
One of the acutest and most original of ethnologists, Desmoulins, originated the idea, which has subsequently been fully developed by Agassiz, that the distribution of the persistent modifications of man is governed by the same laws as that of other animals, and that both fall into the same great distributional provinces.
I have elsewhere stated at length the reasons which lead me to recognize four primary distributional provinces for the terrestrial Vertebrata in the present world, namely, first, the Novozelanian, or New-Zealand province; secondly, the Australian province, including Australia, Tasmania, and the Negrito Islands; thirdly, Austro-Columbia, or South America plus North America as far as Mexico; and fourthly, the rest of the world, or Arctogaea, in which province America north of Mexico constitutes one sub-province, Africa south of the Sahara a second, Hindostan a third, and the remainder of the Old World, a fourth.
And I take refuge in one of two alternatives: either they existed in our own area during the Devonian epoch and we have simply not yet found them; or they formed part of the population of some other distributional province of that day, and only entered our area by migration at the end of the Devonian epoch.
I have elsewhere stated at length the reasons which lead me to recognise four primary distributional provinces for the terrestrial Vertebrata in the present world, namely, first, the Novozelanian, or New-Zealand province; secondly, the Australian province, including Australia, Tasmania, and the Negrito Islands; thirdly, Austro-Columbia, or South America plus North America as far as Mexico; and fourthly, the rest of the world, or Arctogoea, in which province America north of Mexico constitutes one sub-province, Africa south of the Sahara a second, Hindostan a third, and the remainder of the Old World a fourth.
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