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It will be recollected that the epoch assigned for the earliest volcanic eruptions of Auvergne was that here inferred for those of the Lower Rhine viz., the close of the Miocene stage and from evidence subsequently to be adduced from other European districts, it will be found that there was a very widely spread outburst of volcanic action at this epoch.
In the case of the Roman volcanic district, a bay seems to have been formed about the close of the Miocene period, bounded on all sides but the west by hills of limestone, over whose bed strata of marl, sandstone, and conglomerate were deposited.
The submarine origin is denoted by fossils found in the flank; they are of Miocene age, like those common in Madeira, and they were known as early as the days of Clavijo . Las Canadas is not wholly a 'dead creation; the birds were more numerous than on the plains. We saw nothing of the red-legged partridge or the Tetraonidae, reported to be common.
The croziers of some of the young ferns are very perfect, and were at first mistaken by collectors for shells of the genus Planorbis. On the whole, the vegetation of Bovey implies the existence of a sub-tropical climate in Devonshire, in the Lower Miocene period.
And all scientific botanists agree in referring these fossilized forms from the high northern latitudes, to the Miocene period one so remote that we can form no adequate conception of it, except as time may be measured by geologic periods.
Rhinoceroses and zebras, however, tread together the arid plains of Africa in the present day; and the horse has multiplied in that half of America where two or more kinds of tapir still exist. That the continents of the Eocene or Miocene periods were less diversified in respect of swamp and sward, pampas or desert, than those of the Pliocene period, has no support from observation or analogy."
This series of volcanic mountains is much more broken and interrupted than the other two, and a greater proportion of its vents are extinct. It attained its condition of maximum activity during the distant period of the Miocene, and now appears to be passing into a state of gradual extinction.
Peculiar offshoots of the line appeared at various times in the Tertiary. A rhinoceros, semiaquatic in habits, with curved tusks, resembling in aspect the hippopotamus, lived along the water courses of the plains east of the Rockies, and its bones are now found by the thousands in the Miocene of Kansas.
In the Triassic epoch, the distribution of the dry land and of terrestrial vertebrate life appears to have been, generally, similar to that which existed in the Mesozoic epoch; so that the Triassic continents and their faunae seem to be related to the Mesozoic lands and their faunae, just as those of the Miocene epoch are related to those of the present day.
Another series of closely affiliated forms, though the evidence they afford is perhaps less complete than that of the Equine series, is presented to us by the Dichobune of the Eocene epoch, the Cainotherium of the Miocene, and the Tragulidae, or so-called "Musk-deer," of the present day.
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