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Updated: June 16, 2025
Again, note as bearing upon the same point, the singular likeness which obtains between the successive Faunae and Florae, whose remains are preserved on the rocks: you never find any great and enormous difference between the immediately successive Faunae and Florae, unless you have reason to believe there has also been a great lapse of time or a great change of conditions.
The distribution of life in the rivers and lakes of Brazil, the immense number of species and their local circumscription, as distinct faunae in definite areas of the same water-basin, amazed him; while the character of the soil and other geological features confirmed him in his preconceived belief that the glacial period could not have been less than cosmic in its influence.
Again, note as bearing upon the same point, the singular likeness which obtains between the successive Faunae and Florae, whose remains are preserved on the rocks: you never find any great and enormous difference between the immediately successive Faunae and Florae, unless you have reason to believe there has also been a great lapse of time or a great change of conditions.
Thus: Animals and plants began their existence together, not long after the commencement of the deposition of the sedimentary rocks; and then succeeded one another, in such a manner, that totally distinct faunae and florae occupied the whole surface of the earth, one after the other, and during distinct epochs of time.
And should such an hypothesis eventually be proved to be true, in the only way in which it can be demonstrated, viz. by observation and experiment upon the existing forms of life, the conclusion will inevitably present itself, that the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cainozoic faunae and florae, taken together, bear somewhat the same proportion to the whole series of living beings which have occupied this globe, as the existing fauna and flora do to them.
Thus there is a vast negative difference between the Cainozoic and the Mesozoic mammalian faunae of Europe. But there is a still more important positive difference, inasmuch as all these Mammalia appear to be Marsupials belonging to Australian groups, and thus appertaining to a different distributional province from the Eocene and Miocene marsupials, which are Austro-Columbian.
So far back as 1667 Abraham Mylius, in his treatise "De Animalium origine et migratione, populorum," argues that, since there are innumerable species of animals in America which do not exist elsewhere, they must have been made and placed there by the Deity: Buffon no less forcibly insists upon the difference between the Faunae of the old and new world.
In this broad sense, it may with truth be said, that all living animals, and all those dead faunae which geology reveals, are bound together by an all-pervading unity of organisation, of the same character, though not equal in degree, to that which enables us to discern one and the same plan amidst the twenty different segments of a lobster's body.
But if there was this Australian facies about both the terrestrial and the marine faunae of Mesozoic Europe, and if there is this unaccountable and immense break between the fauna of Mesozoic and that of Tertiary Europe, is it not a very obvious suggestion that, in the Mesozoic epoch, the Australian province included Europe, and that the Arctogaeal province was contained within other limits?
Hence it becomes highly probable that the well-known similarities, and no less remarkable differences, between the present Faunae of India and South Africa have arisen in some such fashion as the following.
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