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Updated: June 15, 2025
What is to be done? You want to send me to Africa to capture a live rhinoceros? I will set out to-morrow." "What would be the use! All the information that can be gained by experiment on the higher mammifers is already ours. Since the problem derives the greatest part of its interest from its application to man, it is on man that the new experiment should be performed."
Lyell's conclusion, therefore, is thus far confirmed in the southern hemisphere; and it is the more important, as one is naturally tempted to admit so simple an explanation, that it was the ice-period that caused the extinction of the numerous great mammifers which so lately swarmed over the two Americas.
"Dick," she said to the young novice, "Do you see that singular color of the waters of the Pacific? Is it due to the presence of a marine herb?" "No, Mrs. Weldon," replied Dick Sand, "that tinge is produced by myriads of little crustaceans, which generally serve to nourish the great mammifers. Fishermen call that, not without reason, 'whales' food." "Crustaceans!" said Mrs. Weldon.
The climate, however, may perhaps have somewhat deteriorated since the mammifers embedded at Bahia Blanca lived there; for we must not infer, from the continued existence of the same shells on the present coasts, that there has been no change in climate; for several of these shells now range northward along the shores of Brazil, where the most luxuriant vegetation flourishes under a tropical temperature.
As the land continued to rise, it appears that this source of sediment was cut off; and in its place sand and pebbles were borne down by stronger currents, and conformably deposited over the Pampean strata. The beds are curvilinear, owing to the action of currents, and dip in different directions; they include an extraordinary number of bones of gigantic mammifers and many shells.
It is an interesting circumstance that the first mammifers found should have belonged to the marsupialia, when the place of that order in the scale of creation is considered.
M. Gervais states that the Didelphis crancrivora is found there. It is certain that the West Indies possess some mammifers peculiar to themselves. When America, and especially North America, possessed its elephants, mastodons, horse, and hollow-horned ruminants, it was much more closely related in its zoological characters to the temperate parts of Europe and Asia than it now is.
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