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"There is a new man writing verse in the Tertiary, some of it quite first-rate. You might look at the last number. My blossom this year is magnificent. "With kind regards, I am, "Very sincerely yours, "Gregory Vigil, Esq." Mrs. Pendyce dropped the letter in her lap, and looked at her cousin. "He was at Harrow with Horace. I do like him. He is one of the very nicest men I know."
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?
Independent species are now and then springing up where derivatives should be looked for, while derivatives are everywhere disappearing in non-derivatives. Many of the middle Tertiary molusca, and a large proportion of the later Tertiary period, are specifically identical with the living species, of to-day. What has "natural selection" been doing for this family in the last million years or more?
The former of these suppositions would approach, according to the analogy of the observations made by M. Roziere in Egypt, the sandstone of Calabozo, or tertiary nagelfluhe. A bluish-grey compact limestone, almost destitute of petrifactions, and frequently intersected by small veins of carburetted lime, forms mountains with very abrupt ridges.
In the more level parts, the surface was so coated over with sand, that nothing else could be seen. I have no doubt, however, that the whole of the substrata would have been found an uninterrupted continuation of the tertiary deposit.
On balancing the evidence, however, it is tolerably clear that the volcanic eruptions commenced towards the close of the Cretaceous period, and continued into the commencement of the Tertiary, thus bridging over the interval between the two epochs; and since the greater sheets have been exposed throughout the whole of the Tertiary and Quarternary periods, it is not surprising if they have suffered enormously from denuding agencies, and that any craters or cones of eruption that may once have existed have disappeared.
The most primitive of all known representatives of the earliest fishes are probably the remarkable Pleuracanthida, the genera Pleuracanthus, Xenacanthus, Orthocanthus, etc. We find well-preserved remains of them in the Permian period. Among the extinct earlier sharks of the Tertiary period there were some twice as large as the biggest living fishes; Carcharodon was more than 100 feet long.
The man who calculates that he will have had his fling in the ten or twenty years before tertiary troubles appear may be astonished to find that he can develop tertiary complications in his brain almost before he is well rid of his chancre. "Late accidents," as we call them, are the serious complications of syphilis.
The forests of the arctic zone in tertiary times contained at least three other species of Sequoia, as determined by their remains, one of which, from Spitzbergen, also much resembles the common redwood of California. Another, "which appears to have been the commonest coniferous tree on Disco," was common in England and some other parts of Europe.
But it may perhaps be said that the mammalia afford more conspicuous examples than do the mollusca, insects, or plants of the wide gaps which separate species and genera, and that if in this higher class such a multitude of transitional forms had ever existed as would be required to unite the Tertiary and Recent species into one series or net-work of allied or transitional forms, they could not so entirely have escaped observation whether in the fossil or living fauna.
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