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Was there one and only one first bit of protoplasm? If we were to say that life first appeared on the globe in Cambrian times, just what should we mean? That it began as a single point, or as many points? When we say that the primates first appeared in Eocene times, do we mean that one single primate appeared then? If so, what form went immediately before him? This is all a vain speculation.
The strata were flexured, folded, and often faulted and fissured along lines ranging north and south, the great fault of the Jordan-Arabah valley being the most important. At this period the mountains of the Lebanon, the table-lands of Judæa and of Arabia, formed of limestone, previously constituting the bed of the ocean during the Eocene and Cretaceous periods, were converted into land surfaces.
Upon these follow the so-called Tertiary formations, divided into three periods, all of which have received most characteristic names in this epoch of the world's history we see the first approach to a condition of things resembling that now prevailing, and Sir Charles Lyell has most fitly named its three divisions, the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene.
Intermediate stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground.
A million years, and we are probably in Eocene or Miocene times, among the huge and often grotesque mammals, and our ancestor, a little creature, probably of the marsupial kind, is skulking about and hiding from the great carnivorous beasts that would devour him. "Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look.
It is subdivided into four sections the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene. During these periods there was a very varied development of higher plant and animal forms; the fauna and flora of our planet approached nearer and nearer to the character that they bear to-day. In particular, the most advanced class, the mammals, began to preponderate.
In North America the Eocene formations occupy a large area bordering the Atlantic, which increases in breadth and importance as it is traced southward from Delaware and Maryland to Georgia and Alabama. They also occur in Louisiana and other States both east and west of the valley of the Mississippi.
It is worthy of remark, however, that in the fossil vegetation of the Eocene world these two vegetable tribes are found associated. This fact, it seems to me, should be attributed to the mixing of the mountain Pines with the Palms of the sea-level, during that revulsion of Nature by which they were hurled into the same chaotic heap.
Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going south toward the canon, we descend a grand geologic stairway, every shelf or tread of which consists of different formations fifty or more miles broad, from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand feet at the start, across the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the Permian, to the Carboniferous, which is the bottom or landing of the Grand Canon plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet.
And, hence, I have ever since held that these facts afford evidence of the occurrence of evolution, which, in the sense already defined, may be termed demonstrative. All who have occupied themselves with the structure of Anchitherium, from Cuvier onwards, have acknowledged its many points of likeness to a well-known genus of extinct Eocene mammals, Palæotherium.
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