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Updated: June 5, 2025
During the slowly decreasing warmth of the Pliocene period, as soon as the species in common, which inhabited the New and Old Worlds, migrated south of the Polar Circle, they will have been completely cut off from each other. This separation, as far as the more temperate productions are concerned, must have taken place long ages ago.
Among these are two species of elephant, E. meridionalis, Nesti, and E. antiquus, the former found in the Newer Pliocene beds of the Val d'Arno, near Florence. In the same bed occur Hippopotamus major, Rhinoceros etruscus, both of them also Val d'Arno species, many species of deer considered by Mr. Boyd Dawkins to be characteristic of warmer countries, and also a horse, beaver, and field-mouse.
Nevertheless, looking to a remotely future epoch, there can, I think, be little doubt that all the more modern MARINE formations, namely, the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly modern beds, of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil remains in some degree allied, and from not including those forms which are only found in the older underlying deposits, would be correctly ranked as simultaneous in a geological sense.
Certain species of sharks of medium size in the lower Eocene continue to increase till they attain the astounding dimensions in the Miocene and Pliocene of over one hundred feet long. A certain fish appearing in the Devonian as a small fish of seven centimetres in length, becomes in the Carboniferous era a creature twenty-seven centimetres in length.
P. 122: I am surprised at your saying that "during the whole Tertiary period North America was zoologically far more strongly contrasted with South America than it is now." But we know hardly anything of the latter except during the Pliocene period, and then the mastodon, horse, several great Dentata, etc. etc., were common to the North and South.
But, in deposits which belong to the earlier Pliocene and later Miocene epochs, and which occur in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Greece, in India, we find animals which are extremely like horses which, in fact, are so similar to horses, that you may follow descriptions given in works upon the anatomy of the horse upon the skeletons of these animals but which differ in some important particulars.
The remains of this animal found in what is called the Pliocene Period, show the foot to have been as perfect then as it is now. Mr. Wallace says that man has existed on the earth a hundred thousand years, and that it is probable that he existed four hundred thousand years ago. Of course we do not believe this. We have little faith in the chronology of science.
Outside view of posterior molar, lower jaw: one-third of natural size. Hyaena spelaea, Goldf. Kent's Hole, Torquay, Devonshire; one-third natural size. Teeth of a new species of Arvicola, field-mouse; from the Norwich Crag. Newer Pliocene. a. Grinding surface. b. Side view of the same. c. Geographical Distribution, Form, and Characters of Glacial Drift.
Nevertheless, looking to a remotely future epoch, there can, I think, be little doubt that all the more modern marine formations, namely, the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly modern beds, of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil remains in some degree allied, and from not including those forms which are only found in the older underlying deposits, would be correctly ranked as simultaneous in a geological sense.
The first time that I saw a tank, the way that the monster was blocking a road gorged with transport had something of the ludicrousness of, say, a pliocene monster weighing fifty tons which had nonchalantly lain down at Piccadilly Circus when the traffic was densest. Only the motor-truck drivers and battalions which were halted some distance away minded the delay.
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