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The geniality of the Oligocene period was due, like that of the earlier warm periods, to the low-lying land and very extensive water-surface. These conditions were revolutionised before the end of the Tertiary. Great mountains towered into the snow-line, and vast areas were elevated which had formerly been sea or swamp.
It is claimed by many distinguished authorities that flints slightly touched by the hand of man, or at least used as implements by man, are found in abundance in England, France, and Germany, and belong to the Pliocene period. Continental authorities even refer some of them to the Miocene and the last part of the Oligocene.
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.
To put it still more precisely, if we found a whole series of remains of man's ancestors during the Tertiary, we should probably class them, broadly, as femur-remains in the Eocene, monkey-remains in the Oligocene, and ape-remains in the Miocene. In that sense only man "descends from a monkey."
Professor Beyrich confines the term "Miocene" to those strata which agree in age with the faluns of Touraine, and he has proposed the term "Oligocene" for those older formations called Lower Miocene in this work. In the hills of which the Superga forms a part there is a great series of Tertiary strata which pass downward into the Lower Miocene.
Shaded horizontal lines: Eocene formations. The strata next in order in the descending series are those which I term Eocene. When this map was constructed I classed as the newer part of the Eocene those Tertiary strata which have been described in the last chapter as Lower Miocene, and to which M. Beyrich has given the name of Oligocene.
Whatever the period of time may be since some cosmic cataclysm scattered the material of our solar system in the form of a nebula, it is only a fraction of that larger and illimitable time which the evolution of the stars dimly suggests to the scientific imagination. Quaternary Holocene 500,000 years Pleistocene Tertiary Pliocene 5,500,000 years or Miocene Cenozoic Oligocene Eocene
In the succeeding geological period, the Oligocene, we find several horse-types in which the adaptation of the limbs to running on the firm grassy plains and of the teeth to eating the grass continues. Mesohippus has lost the fourth toe of the fore foot, which is now reduced to a splintbone, and the lateral toes of its hind foot are shrinking.
There is also some upheaval in North America, and a bridge of land begins to connect the north and south, and permit an effective mingling of their populations. But the advance is, as I said, suspended, and the Oligocene period maintains the golden age. With the Miocene period the land resumes its rise. A chill is felt along the American coast, showing a fall in the temperature of the Atlantic.
We mean a tail! If afternoon teas had been started in the Oligocene Epoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced that evolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would have perfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it such a one as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from his tea-cup. Nay, more.
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