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Is it not probable then, that, just as in the Miocene epoch, we find an ancestral equine form less modified than Equus, so, if we go back to the Eocene epoch, we shall find some quadruped related to the Anchitherium, as Hipparion is related to Equus, and consequently departing less from the average form?
Another group may be finally mentioned, viz. the frogs and toads, anourous Batrachians, of which we have at present no relic of any kind linking them on to the Eft group on the one hand, or to reptiles on the other. The only instance in which an approach towards a series of nearly related forms has been obtained is the existing horse, its predecessor Hipparion and other extinct forms.
Seven years ago, when I happened to be looking critically into the bearing of palæontological facts upon the doctrine of evolution, it appeared to me that the Anchitherium, the Hipparion, and the modern horses, constitute a series in which the modifications of structure coincide with the order of chronological occurrence, in the manner in which they must coincide, if the modern horses really are the result of the gradual metamorphosis, in the course of the Tertiary epoch, of a less specialised ancestral form.
We saw an animal resembling a deer on one hand, and a tapir on the other, as well as a kind of toed horse or hipparion, and a number of domestic pets all strange to us. The people, according to their tradition, came originally from a temperate land far across the ocean to the south-east, which is now a dark and frozen desert.
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