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The maximum length is three miles by about the same breadth, and the circumference, including the indentations, may be fifteen. The surface is rolling composed of humus and clay, corallines and shelly conglomerates based on tertiary limestone and perhaps sandstone; dwarf clearings alternate with tracts of bush grass, and with a bushy second growth, lacking large trees.
The quantity of calcareous matter in this formation, especially in those large districts where the whole mass passes into tosca-rock, is very great: I have already remarked on the close resemblance in external and microscopical appearance, between this tosca-rock and the strata at Coquimbo, which have certainly resulted from the decay and attrition of recent shells: I dare not, however, extend this conclusion to the calcareous rocks of the Pampas, more especially as the underlying tertiary strata in western Banda Oriental show that at that period there was a copious emission of carbonate of lime, in connection with volcanic action.
In the Miocene period there is a great development of the horse-like mammals. We have the remains of more than forty species, some continuing the main line of development on the firm and growing prairies of the Miocene, some branching into the softer meadows or the forests, and giving rise to types which will not outlive the Tertiary.
Broadly speaking, the vegetation of the first part of the Tertiary Era was a mixture of sub-tropical and temperate forms, a confused mass of Ferns, Conifers, Ginkgoales, Monocotyledons, and Dicotyledons.
The rest of the Ungulates continued to develop through the Tertiary, and fortunately we are enabled to follow the development of two of the most interesting of them, the horse and the elephant, in considerable detail. As I said above, the primitive Ungulate soon branches into three types which dimly foreshadow the tapir, the horse, and the rhinoceros, the three forms of the Perissodactyl.
The rocks underlying the Columbia lavas, where exposed to view, are seen to be cut by numerous great dikes of dense basalt, which mark the fissures through which the molten rock rose to the surface. The Tertiary included times of widespread and intense volcanic action in other continents as well as in North America.
Uncritical science still attributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythical notion of force, for instance, being a transposed sensation of effort.
P. 122: I am surprised at your saying that "during the whole Tertiary period North America was zoologically far more strongly contrasted with South America than it is now." But we know hardly anything of the latter except during the Pliocene period, and then the mastodon, horse, several great Dentata, etc. etc., were common to the North and South.
In those early days she had been much loved by others of her own sex and age, and had used to be seen about the village as one of three all nearly of the same year walking home from school side by side; Tess the middle one in a pink print pinafore, of a finely reticulated pattern, worn over a stuff frock that had lost its original colour for a nondescript tertiary marching on upon long stalky legs, in tight stockings which had little ladder-like holes at the knees, torn by kneeling in the roads and banks in search of vegetable and mineral treasures; her then earth-coloured hair hanging like pot-hooks; the arms of the two outside girls resting round the waist of Tess; her arms on the shoulders of the two supporters.
Simply this, that, if the doctrine of evolution had not existed, palaeontologists must have invented it, so irresistibly is it forced upon the mind by the study of the remains of the Tertiary mammalia which have been brought to light since 1859.
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