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And that is true of all the horses of the latter part of the Pliocene epoch.
Quoskh is also, undoubtedly, much smaller than he once was; but still his legs and neck are disproportionately long, when one thinks of the waters he wades and the nest he builds; and the tracks he leaves in the mud are startlingly like those fossilized footprints of giant birds that one finds in the rocks of the Pliocene era, deep under the earth's surface, to tell what sort of creatures lived in the vast solitudes before man came to replenish the earth and subdue it.
I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our earth the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals.
No marine deposits of later than miocene age occur in or about it; and there is every reason to believe that the Syro-Arabian plateau has been dry land, throughout the pliocene and later epochs, down to the present time.
But the reader must bear in mind that the terms Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene were originally invented with reference purely to conchological data, and in that sense have always been and are still used by me.
There are authorities, such as Deniker, who hold that even the latest research shows these remains to be Pliocene, but it is disputed. The Java race may be a surviving remnant of an earlier phase of human evolution. The most interesting subject for inquiry is the fortune of our human and prehuman forerunners during the Pliocene and Pleistocene periods.
But Austro-Columbia presents difficulties from which Australia is free; Camelidae and Tapiridae are now indigenous in South America as they are in Arctogaea; and, among the Pliocene Austro-Columbian mammals, the Austro-Columbian genera Equus, Mastodon, and Machairodus are numbered. Are these Postmiocene immigrants, or Praemiocene natives? Cunningham sent over to me some time ago from Patagonia.
That the latest outbreaks belonged to the Newer Pliocene Period, I infer from the close affinity to the present flora of Madeira of the fossil plants preserved in a leaf-bed in the north-eastern part of the island.
Cases will occur where it may be scarcely possible to draw the line of demarcation between the Newer Pliocene and Pleistocene, or between the latter and the recent deposits; and we must expect these difficulties to increase rather than diminish with every advance in our knowledge, and in proportion as gaps are filled up in the series of geological records.
Hipparion Upper Miocene and Pliocene; still three toes, but 3 more like the modern horse and 2 and 4 still further diminished. 5. Pliohippus later Pliocene, very like Equus. 6. Mr.
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