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Updated: May 14, 2025
It is very remarkable that an animal so large, so peculiar, and of such a high type of form as the Orangutan, should be confined to so limited a district to two islands, and those almost the last inhabited by the higher Mammalia; for, east of Borneo and Java, the Quadrumania, Ruminants, Carnivora, and many other groups of Mammalla diminish rapidly, and soon entirely disappear.
Among the fossils of Pikermi, Gaudry found the successive stages by which the ancient civets passed into the more modern hyaenas; through the Tertiary deposits of Western America, Marsh tracked the successive forms by which the ancient stock of the horse has passed into its present form; and innumerable less complete indications of the mode of evolution of other groups of the higher mammalia have been obtained.
Further inland, the soil is more fertile, but still deficient in wood. The background every where presents lofty mountains; we visited only those to the north, at the foot of which the Russian settlement Ross is situated. Here a fine forest of lofty pines, mingled with oak and horse chesnut-trees, charms the eye. Of the mammalia of this hitherto unexplored country, only a few can be cited.
At the bottom of these sands a green clay occurs, containing a small oyster, Ostrea cyathula, Lam., which, although of slight thickness, is spread over a wide area. This clay rests immediately on the Paris gypsum, or that series of beds of gypsum and gypseous marl from which Cuvier first obtained several species of Palaeotherium and other extinct mammalia.
But if this be the case, how much further back must we go to find the common stock of the monodelphous Mammalia? As to the Didelphia, if we may trust the evidence which seems to be afforded by their very scanty remains, a Hypsiprymnoid form existed at the epoch of the Trias, contemporaneously with a Carnivorous form.
The two component parts of the animal could not be combined, as the upper portion would belong to the mammalia, and be a hot-blooded animal, the lower to a cold-blooded class of natural history. Such a junction would, therefore, be impossible.
During the levelling up of these old channels, a flood sometimes cuts into and partially removes portions of the previously stratified matter, causing those repeated signs of furrowing and filling up of cavities, those memorials of doing and undoing, of which the tool-bearing sands and gravels of Abbeville and Amiens afford such reiterated illustrations, and of which a parallel is furnished by the ancient alluvium of the Thames valley, where similar bones of extinct mammalia and shells, including Cyrena fluminalis, are found.
Looking at the matter from the point of view of organisation alone, no one probably would ever have disputed the view of Linnaeus, that man should be placed, merely as a peculiar species, at the head of the mammalia and of those apes.
The bones both of the wild bull and the bison are invariably split in this manner. As a rule, the lower jaws with teeth occur in greater abundance than any other parts of the skeleton a circumstance which, geologists know, holds good in regard to fossil mammalia of all periods.
Thus, the bat's wing is a most abnormal structure in the class mammalia; but the rule would not here apply, because there is a whole group of bats having wings; it would apply only if some one species of bat had its wings developed in some remarkable manner in comparison with the other species of the same genus.
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