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The pisolitic formation, therefore, may eventually prove to be somewhat more intermediate in date between the secondary and tertiary epochs than the Maestricht rock.
The lesions met with later correspond to those of the tertiary period of the acquired disease, but as they affect bones which are still actively growing, the effects are more striking. Gummatous disease may come and go over periods of many years, with the result that the external appearance and architectural arrangement of a long bone come to be profoundly altered.
Tertiary strata, it should be explained, had never hitherto yielded any fossils bordering on the human type, but this now famous skeleton was unmistakably akin to the human. The thigh in particular, taken by itself, would have been pronounced by any competent anatomist to be of human origin. Unquestionably the individual who bore it had been accustomed to take an erect attitude in walking.
We shall see later that the rhinoceros continued in Europe even during the severe conditions of the glacial period, in a branch that developed a woolly coat. There were also in the early Tertiary several sidebranches of the horse-tapir-rhinoceros family. The Palaeotheres were more or less between the horse and the tapir in structure; the Anoplotheres between the tapir and the ruminant.
This elevation is observed through a space of many hundred miles, increasing toward the north. The southern extremity, on the contrary, experiences a slow depression. These slow movements are nothing more than a continuation of what has been going on for numberless ages. Since the tertiary period two-thirds of Europe have been lifted above the sea.
In South America we have distinct evidence that at nearly the same tertiary period, the bed of the sea off parts of the coast of Chile and off Patagonia was sinking, though these regions are very remote from each other.
It cannot be said, on the ordinary view of creation, that there has not been time for the creation of mammals; many volcanic islands are sufficiently ancient, as shown by the stupendous degradation which they have suffered, and by their tertiary strata: there has also been time for the production of endemic species belonging to other classes; and on continents it is known that new species of mammals appear and disappear at a quicker rate than other and lower animals.
The most striking case, however, is that of the Whale family; as these animals have huge bones, are marine, and range over the world, the fact of not a single bone of a whale having been discovered in any secondary formation, seemed fully to justify the belief that this great and distinct order had been suddenly produced in the interval between the latest secondary and earliest tertiary formation.
We may take, after the Lemurs, the earliest and lowest Platyrrhines of South America, with thirty-six teeth, as the twenty-sixth stage of our genealogy; they were developed from the Lemurs by a peculiar modification of the brain, teeth, nose, and fingers. They lived during the Tertiary period, and are found fossilised in the Miocene.
From a granitic and gneissose platform situated near the centre of France, and separated from the western spurs of the Alps by the wide valley of the Rhone, there rises a group of volcanic mountains surpassing in variety of form and structure any similar mountain group in Europe, and belonging to an epoch ranging from the Middle Tertiary down almost to the present day.
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