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Somewhere along his line he picked up the four-chambered heart, the warm blood, the placenta, the diaphragm, the plantigrade foot, the mammary glands indeed, what has he not picked up on the long road of his many transformations? He left some of his superfluous forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, and kept thirty-two.
The eocene period presents, in three continental groups, 1238 species of shells, of which forty-two, or 3.5 per cent, yet flourish.
A great majority of the Eocene genera have disappeared from our temperate climates, but not the whole of them; and they must all have exerted some influence on the assemblages of species which succeeded them.
So far as the Upper Eocene and the Miocene Mammalian Faunae are comparable, their relations are such as in no way to oppose the hypothesis that the older are the progenitors of the more recent forms, while, in some cases, they distinctly favour that hypothesis.
"The most marked changes undergone by the successive equine genera are as follows: First, increase in size; second, increase in speed, through concentration of limb bones; third, elongation of head and neck, and modifications of skull. The eocene Orohippus was the size of a fox. Miohippus and Anchitherium, from the miocene, were about as large as a sheep.
When we find that the surviving reptiles retreat southward, only lingering in Europe during the renewed warmth of the Eocene and Miocene periods, this interpretation is sufficiently confirmed.
In all the essentials of its very peculiar structure, the Macropoma of the Chalk is identical with the Coelacanthus of the Coal. Look at the genus Lepidotus, again, persisting without a modification of importance from the Liassic to the Eocene formations, inclusive.
There is evidence here of a long series of submarine volcanic eruptions of Eocene date, and during some of them, as Sir R. Murchison has suggested, shoals of fish were probably destroyed by the evolution of heat, noxious gases, and tufaceous mud, just as happened when Graham's Island was thrown up between Sicily and Africa in 1831, at which time the waters of the Mediterranean were seen to be charged with red mud, and covered with dead fish over a wide area.
No absolute repression is forced, no absolute encouragement is indorsed. Harmonious equilibrium, or normality, continues. But now there come upon the scene the unconscious fears. In the paleontology of character, these fears are the deepest strata, the eocene era, so to speak, of the soul.
In the earlier Miocene, and perhaps the later Eocene deposits of some parts of Europe, another extinct animal has been discovered, which Cuvier, who first described some fragments of it, considered to be a Palaeotherim. But as further discoveries threw new light upon its structure, it was recognised as a distinct genus, under the name of Anchitherium.
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