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It is subdivided into four sections the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene. During these periods there was a very varied development of higher plant and animal forms; the fauna and flora of our planet approached nearer and nearer to the character that they bear to-day. In particular, the most advanced class, the mammals, began to preponderate.
But by the necessities of the case, the sex wishes become overlayed by reflexes associated with the mother and father and close associates as love. This might be termed the oligocene. As the circle of acquaintance widens, other loved objects usher in the miocene phases of the development.
Europe, during the Pliocene period, seems not to have enjoyed a climate fitting it to be the habitation of the quadrumanous mammalia; but we no sooner carry back our researches into Miocene times, where plants and insects, like those of Oeningen, and shells, like those of the Faluns of the Loire, would imply a warmer temperature both of sea and land, than we begin to discover fossil apes and monkeys north of the Alps and Pyrenees.
The turtles are referred to the genus Testudo, but have some affinity to Emys. On the whole, the Nebraska formation is probably newer than the Paris gypsum, and referable to the Lower Miocene period, as above defined. Eocene Areas of North of Europe. Upper Eocene of England. Bembridge Beds. Osborne or St. Helen's Beds. Headon Series. Fossils of the Barton Sands and Clays. Middle Eocene of England.
But, in deposits which belong to the earlier Pliocene and later Miocene epochs, and which occur in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Greece, in India, we find animals which are extremely like horses which, in fact, are so similar to horses, that you may follow descriptions given in works upon the anatomy of the horse upon the skeletons of these animals but which differ in some important particulars.
It is unfortunate that we have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in the Miocene Austro-Columbian province.
There seems little doubt that the well-known columnar basalt of Staffa, as well as that of Antrim in Ireland, are of the same age, and not of higher antiquity, as once suspected. A large portion of the volcanic rocks of the Lower Rhine and the Eifel are coeval with the Lower Miocene deposits to which most of the "Brown-Coal" of Germany belongs.
Of course, we have no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first man-like beings. We are not yet settled even as to the time of their first appearance, geologists being inclined at present to see their traces in the pliocene, or even the miocene, deposits of the Tertiary period. But we have the indirect method which permits us to throw some light even upon that remote antiquity.
Although the more ancient portion of the volcanic eruptions by which the island of Madeira and the neighbouring one of Porto Santo were built up occurred, as we shall presently see, in the Upper Miocene Period, a still larger part of the island is of Pliocene date.
I shall now proceed to treat of the third division, which is of Lower Miocene age. Nearly the whole of this Lower Molasse is fresh-water, yet some of the inferior beds contain a mixture of marine and fluviatile shells, the Cerithium margaritaceum, a well-known Lower Miocene fossil, being one of the marine species.
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