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Buckland was of a jovial disposition, and always sure to see the humorous side of the facts which were presented to him; and in his social life he was extremely unconventional, and inclined to merry pranks. His books are as delightful as was their writer. They are records of accurate, useful, eye-opening details as to fauna, all the world over.
But if there was this Australian facies about both the terrestrial and the marine faunae of Mesozoic Europe, and if there is this unaccountable and immense break between the fauna of Mesozoic and that of Tertiary Europe, is it not a very obvious suggestion that, in the Mesozoic epoch, the Australian province included Europe, and that the Arctogaeal province was contained within other limits?
There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications.
Thus, apart from its order of superposition, its greater antiquity than the Norwich and glacial beds, already described, is proved by the greater departure from the fauna of our seas.
The Ural mountains might be distinguished as a fourth sub-region, while the south-coast of the Crimea and Caucasus, as well as the Caspian deserts, have their own individuality. As for the adjoining seas, the fauna of the Arctic Ocean off the Norwegian coast corresponds, in its western parts at least, to that of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream.
The latter offers, I believe, the oldest known example of a true carnivorous animal in the series of British fossils, although I attach very little theoretical importance to the fact, because herbivorous species are those most easily met with in a fossil state in all save cavern deposits. In another point of view, however, this fauna deserves notice.
Again he remarks that "until lately the fossils of the coal-measures were separated from those of the antecedent Silurian group by a very abrupt and decided line of demarcation; but recent discoveries have brought to light in Devonshire, Belgium, the Eifel, and Westphalia, the remains of a fauna of an intervening period."
A similar example of animal life in the absence of light is to be found in the fauna of caves and grottoes. This was first made known to the world by Austrian and American naturalists. The well known Adelsberg grotto in Krain, and the gigantic Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, furnished much interesting material for a detailed study of the biological conditions of subterraneous animal life.
There, too, the colonists again found groups of magnificent kauries, their cylindrical trunks, crowned with a cone of verdure, rising to a height of two hundred feet. These were the tree-kings of New Zealand, as celebrated as the cedars of Lebanon. As to the fauna, there was no addition to those species already known to the hunters.
Altogether, only one hundred and fifty species, including those that I had collected, were known from Nicaragua. Fragmentary as our knowledge is, it is sufficient, in Mr. Salvin's opinion, to indicate, with tolerable accuracy, to which of the two sub-provinces of the Central American fauna the forest region of Chontales belongs.
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