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families of rodents and Edentata are here abundant, many of the genera being the same but several new ones also appearing. There are also horses, peccaries, a mastodon, llamas, and deer; but besides these there are a number of altogether peculiar forms, such as the Macrauchenia, allied to the Tapir and Palæotherium ; the Homalodontotherium, allied to the miocene Hyracodon of North America; and the Toxodontidae, a group of very large animals having affinities to Ungulates, rodents, Edentata, and Sirenia, and therefore probably the representative of a very ancient type.

Here then we meet with a mixture of highly developed and recent, with low and ancient types, but the latter largely predominate; and the most probable explanation seems to be that the same concurrence of favourable conditions which allowed the megatherium and megalonyx to enter North America also led to an immigration of horses, deer, mastodons, and many of the Felidæ into South America. These inter-migrations appear to have taken place at several remote intervals, the northern and southern continents being for the most part quite separated, and cach developing its own peculiar forms of life. This view is supported by the curious fact of a large number of the marine fishes of the two sides of Central America being absolutely identical-implying a recent union of the two oceans and separation of the continents -while the mollusca of the Pacific coast of America bear so close a relation to those of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic coasts, as to indicate a somewhat more remote but longer continued sea-passage. The straits connecting the two oceans were probably situated in Nicaragua and to the south of Panama, leaving the

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highlands of Mexico and Guatemala united to North America.

Around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea there is a wide belt of rather shallow water, and during the alternate elevations and subsidences to which this region has been subjected, the newly raised land would afford a route for the passage of immigrants between North and South America. The great depression of the ocean, believed to have occurred during the Glacial period (caused by the locking-up of the water in the two polar masses of ice), may perhaps have afforded the opportunity for those latest immigrations which gave so striking a character to the North American fauna in Post-Pliocene times.

Among the changes which South America itself has undergone, perhaps the most important has been its separation into a group of large islands. Such a change is clearly indicated by the immense area and low elevation of the great alluvial plains of the Orinoko, Amazon, and La Plata, as well as by certain features in the distribution of the existing Neotropical fauna. A subsidence of less than 2,000 feet would convert the highlands of Guiana and Brazil into islands separated by a shallow strait from the chain of the Andes. When this occurred the balance of the land was probably restored by an elevation of the extensive submerged banks on the east coast of South America, which in South Brazil and Patagonia are several hundred miles wide, embracing the Falkland Islands, and reaching far to the south of Cape Horn.

Looking, then, at the whole of the evidence at our command, we seem justified in concluding that the past

histories of North and South America have been different, and in some respects strongly contrasted. North America was evidently in very early times so far connected with Europe and Asia as to interchange with those continents the higher types of animal life as they were successively developed in either hemisphere. These more perfectly organised beings rapidly gained the ascendency, and led to the extinction of most of the lower forms which had preceded them. The Nearctic has thus run a course parallel to that of the Palearctic region, although its fauna is, and perhaps always has been, less diversified and more subject to incursions of lower types from adjacent lands in the southern hemisphere.

South America, on the other hand, has had a history in many respects parallel to that of Africa. Both have long existed either as continents or groups of large islands in the southern hemisphere, and, for the most part completely separated from the northern continents; and each accordingly developed its peculiar types from those ancestral and lowly-organised forms which first entered it. South America, however, seems to have had a larger area and more favourable conditions, and it remained almost completely isolated till a later period. It was therefore able to develop a more-varied and extensive fauna of its own peculiar types, and its union with the northern continent has been so recent, and is even now maintained by so narrow an isthmus, that it has never been overrun with the more perfect mammalia to anything like the extent that has occurred in Africa. South America, therefore, almost as completely as Australia, has preserved for us examples of a number of low and early types of mammalian life, which, had not the

entire country been isolated from the northern continent during middle and late Tertiary times, would long since have become extinct.

The Australian Region.-There only remains for us now to consider the relation of the island-continent of Australia to Asia and South America, with both which countries it has a certain amount of zoological connection.

Australia, including New Guinea (which has in recent times been united with it), differs from all the other continents by the extreme uniformity and lowly organisation of its mammalia which almost all belong to one of the lowest orders-the marsupials. Monkeys, carnivora, insectivora, and the great and almost ubiquitous class of hoofed-animals, are all alike wanting; the only mammals besides marsupials being a few species of a still lower type-the monotremes, and a few of the very smallest forms of rodents-the mice. The marsupials, however, are very numerous and varied, constituting 6 families and 33 genera, of which there are about 120 known species. None of these families is represented in any other continent; and this fact alone is sufficient to prove that Australia must have remained almost or quite isolated during the whole of the Tertiary period.

In birds there is, as we might expect, less complete isolation; yet there are a number of very peculiar types. About 15 families are confined to the Australian region, among which are the paradise-birds, the honey-suckers, the lyre-birds, the brush-tongued lories, the moundmakers, and the cassowaries.

Our knowledge of the former mammalian inhabitants

of Australia is imperfect, as all yet discovered are from Post-Tertiary or very late Tertiary desposits. It is interesting to find, however, that all belong to the marsupial type, although several are quite unlike any living animals, and some are of enormous size, almost rivalling the mastodons and megatheriums of the northern continents. In the earliest Tertiary formation of Europe remains of marsupials have been found, but they all belong to the opossum type, which is unknown in Australia; and this supports the view that no communication existed between the Palearctic and Australian regions even at this early period. Much farther back, however, in the Oolite and Trias formations, remains of a number of small mammalia have been found which are almost certainly marsupial, and bear a very close resemblance to the Myrmecobius, a small and very rare mammal still living in Australia. An animal of somewhat similar type has been discovered in rocks of the same age in North America; and we have, therefore, every reason to believe, that it was at or near this remote epoch when Australia, or some land which has been since in connection with it, received a stock of mammalian immigrants from the great northern continent; since which time it has almost certainly remained completely isolated.

The occurrence of the marsupial opossums in America has been thought by some writers to imply an early connection between that continent and Australia; but the fact that opossums existed in Europe in Eocene and Miocene times, and that no trace of them has been found in North or South America before the Post-Pliocene period, renders it almost certain that they entered America

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