So, again,
several highly competent observers believe that the existing
productions of the United States are more closely related to those
which lived in Europe during certain later tertiary stages, than to
those which now live here; and if this be so, it is evident that
fossiliferous beds deposited at the present day on the shores of North
America would hereafter be liable to be classed with somewhat older
European beds. 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 fact of the forms of life changing simultaneously, in the above
large sense, at distant parts of the world, has greatly struck those
admirable observers, MM. de Verneuil and d'Archiac. After referring to
the parallelism of the palaeozoic forms of life in various parts of
Europe, they add, "If struck by this strange sequence, we turn our
attention to North America, and there discover a series of analogous
phenomena, it will appear certain that all these modifications of
species, their extinction, and the introduction of new ones, cannot be
owing to mere changes in marine currents or other causes more or less
local and temporary, but depend on general laws which govern the whole
animal kingdom.
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