ON THE FORMS OF LIFE CHANGING ALMOST SIMULTANEOUSLY THROUGHOUT THE
WORLD.
Scarcely any palaeontological discovery is more striking than the
fact, that the forms of life change almost simultaneously throughout
the world. Thus our European Chalk formation can be recognised in many
distant parts of the world, under the most different climates, where
not a fragment of the mineral chalk itself can be found; namely, in
North America, in equatorial South America, in Tierra del Fuego, at
the Cape of Good Hope, and in the peninsula of India. For at these
distant points, the organic remains in certain beds present an
unmistakeable degree of resemblance to those of the Chalk. It is not
that the same species are met with; for in some cases not one species
is identically the same, but they belong to the same families, genera,
and sections of genera, and sometimes are similarly characterised in
such trifling points as mere superficial sculpture. Moreover other
forms, which are not found in the Chalk of Europe, but which occur in
the formations either above or below, are similarly absent at these
distant points of the world. In the several successive palaeozoic
formations of Russia, Western Europe and North America, a similar
parallelism in the forms of life has been observed by several authors:
so it is, according to Lyell, with the several European and North
American tertiary deposits. Even if the few fossil species which are
common to the Old and New Worlds be kept wholly out of view, the
general parallelism in the successive forms of life, in the stages of
the widely separated palaeozoic and tertiary periods, would still be
manifest, and the several formations could be easily correlated.
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