United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The same moral is inculcated by the study of every other order of Tertiary monodelphous Mammalia. Each of these orders is represented in the Miocene epoch: the Eocene formation, as I have already said, contains Cheiroptera, Insectivora, Rodentia, Ungulata, Carnivora, and Cetacea.
Professor Heer has not ventured to identify any of this vast assemblage of Miocene plants and insects with living species, so far at least as to assign to them the same specific names, but he presents us with a list of what he terms homologous forms, which are so like the living ones that he supposes the one to have been derived genealogically from the others.
Consider how long a time has elapsed since the Miocene epoch. Yet, at that time, there is reason to believe that every important group in every order of the Mammalia was represented.
The Swiss Lower Miocene may best be studied on the northern borders of the Lake of Geneva, between Lausanne and Vevay, where the contiguous villages of Monod and Rivaz are situated. The strata there, which I have myself examined, consist of alternations of conglomerate, sandstone, and finely laminated marls with fossil plants.
There are, indeed, no less than 81 species of these Older Miocene plants which pass up into the flora of Oeningen. This fact is important as bearing on the propriety of classing the Lower Molasse of Switzerland as belonging to the Miocene rather than to the latter part of the Eocene period.
When the high excentricity passed away the glacial epoch also passed away in the Temperate zone; but it persists in the Arctic zone, where during the Miocene there were mild climates, and this is due to the persistence of the changed geographical conditions. The present Arctic climate is itself a comparatively new and abnormal state of things due to geographical modification.
No marine deposits of later than miocene age occur in or about it; and there is every reason to believe that the Syro-Arabian plateau has been dry land, throughout the pliocene and later epochs, down to the present time.
Pigs, origin of the improved breeds of; numerical proportion of the sexes in; stripes of young; tusks of miocene; sexual preference shewn by. Pike, American, brilliant colours of the male, during the breeding season. Pike, reasoning powers of; male, devoured by females. Pike, L.O., on the psychical elements of religion. Pimelia striata, sounds produced by the female. Pinel, hairiness in idiots.
Intermediate stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground.
. . .I thank you very sincerely for your most captivating general work on the "Principles of Zoology." I am quite in love with it. I beseech you to look at my memoir, and especially at my reasoning about the miocene and pliocene divisions of the Alps and Italy. It seems to me manifest that the percentage system derived from marine life can never be applied to tertiary TERRESTRIAL successions. . .
Word Of The Day