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In thus passing from the older to the newer members of the Tertiary system, we meet with many chasms, but none which separate entirely, by a broad line of demarcation, one state of the organic world from another. There are no signs of an abrupt termination of one fauna and flora, and the starting into life of new and wholly distinct forms.
Add to these the cases of Iceland and the volcanic islands of the Pacific, and we have almost the whole of the very active volcanoes of the world. Then for the purposes of our inquiry we have to ascertain how these active vents of eruption compare, as regards the magnitude of their operations, with those of the pre-historic and later Tertiary times.
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.
That considerable differences are often discernible between tertiary individuals and their supposed descendants of the present day affords no argument against Darwin's theory, as has been rashly thought, but is decidedly in its favor.
We cannot suppose that the many atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans all have had a late origin, and yet should they remain at their present level, subjected only to the action of the sea and to the growing powers of the coral, during as many centuries as must have elapsed since any of the earlier tertiary epochs, it cannot, I think, be doubted that their lagoons and the islets on their reef, would present a totally different appearance from what they now do.
But the nature and formation of those bodies are not left in this obscurity; for, the secondary masses, which are interposed, participate so precisely of what is truly opposite and characteristic in the primary and tertiary masses, that it requires nothing more than to see this distinction of things in its true light, to be persuaded, that in those three different things we may perceive a certain gradation, which here takes place among the works of nature, and forms three steps distinguishable by a naturalist, although in reality nothing but the variable measure of similar operations.
Muriate of soda is found in particles invisible to the naked eye. The relations of position or superposition between this soil and the tertiary rocks does not appear sufficiently clear to enable me to pronounce with certainty on this element, the most important of positive geology.
+The Seriousness of Late Syphilis.+ While we recognize a group of symptoms in syphilis which we call late or tertiary, there is no definite or sharp boundary of time separating secondary from tertiary periods.
At this junction of the clay and the gypsum the majority of French geologists have always drawn the line between the Middle and Lower Tertiary, or between the Miocene and Eocene formations, regarding the Fontainebleau sands and the Ostrea cyathula clay as the base of the Miocene, and the gypsum, with its mammalia, as the top of the Eocene group.
The speechless ape-men or Alali certainly existed towards the end of the Tertiary period, during the Pliocene, possibly even the Miocene, period. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. I have also dealt fully with the relations of the various races and species of men to each other.
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