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What charming hours I passed thus at the window of the saloon! What new specimens of submarine flora and fauna did I admire under the brightness of our electric lantern! The 9th of February the Nautilus floated in the broadest part of the Red Sea, which is comprised between Souakin, on the west coast, and Komfidah, on the east coast, with a diameter of ninety miles.
This place had then developed a fauna and flora of its own, including such monsters as the one which I had seen, which may well have been the old cave-bear, enormously enlarged and modified by its new environment. For countless aeons the internal and the external creation had kept apart, growing steadily away from each other.
The Ganges and the Mississippi have long since flooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal's cynical friend declared the Syrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. And what has thus been going on slowly within the memory of the last few generations has been going on constantly from time immemorial, and peopling Britain in all its parts with its now existing fauna and flora.
It began with the larger part of North America emerged as great land masses. It closed with most of the interior of the continental plateau covered with a shallow sea. It is now for the first time that we find preserved in the offshore deposits of the Cambrian seas enough remains of animal life to be properly called a fauna.
In fact, as I have recently endeavoured to prove to the Society, there was an Arctogaeal continent and an Arctogaeal province of distribution in Triassic times as there is now; and the Sauropsida and Marsupialia which constituted that fauna were, I doubt not, the progenitors of the Sauropsida and Marsupialia of the whole Mesozoic epoch.
In common with the rest of the fauna of Caprona the first law of nature as they seemed to understand it was to kill kill kill.
The Crustaceans were plentifully represented by the Trilobites, which appear to have swarmed in the Silurian seas just as crabs and shrimps do in our own; no less than 263 species have been found in the British Silurian fauna.
But each fauna is not necessarily exactly intermediate, as unequal intervals of time have elapsed between consecutive formations. It is no real objection to the truth of the statement, that the fauna of each period as a whole is nearly intermediate in character between the preceding and succeeding faunas, that certain genera offer exceptions to the rule.
That there is no absolute break between formation and formation, that there has been no sudden disappearance of all the forms of life and replacement of them by others, but that changes have gone on slowly and gradually, that one type has died out and another has taken its place, and that thus, by insensible degrees, one fauna has been replaced by another, are conclusions strengthened by constantly increasing evidence.
The expedition was up among the thousand tributaries and enormous hinterland of a great river, up where the maps had to be made, savage dialects studied, and all manner of strange flora and fauna expected. But this story is not about that expedition. That was only the merest starter for ours. My interest was first roused by talk among our guides.
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