Page:A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere.djvu/42

18 18 LAND MAMMALS IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE This is a representative series of the wide-spread and manifold non-marine Tertiary deposits of the Great Plains, but a much more extensive and subdivided scheme would be needed to show with any degree of fullness the wonderfully complete record of that portion of the continent during the Tertiary period. A much more elaborate table will be found in Pro- fessor Osborn's "Age of Mammals," p. 41. There are some differences of practice among geologists as to this scheme of classification, though the differences are not those of principle. No question arises concerning the reality of the divisions, or their order of succession in time, but merely as to the rank or relative importance which should be attributed to some of them, and that is a very minor consideration. Much greater difficulty and, consequently, much more radical differences of interpretation arise when the attempt is made to correlate or synchronize the smaller subdivisions, as found in the various continents, with one another, because of the geographical differences in contemporary life. Between Eu- rope and North America there has always been a certain pro- portion of mammalian forms in common, a proportion that was at one time greater, at another less, and this community renders the correlation of the larger divisions of the Tertiary in the two continents comparatively easy, and even in the minor subdivisions very satisfactory progress has been made, so that it is possible to trace in some detail the migrations of mammals from the eastern to the western hemisphere and vice versa. Such intermigrations were made possible by the land-bridges connecting America with Europe across the Atlantic, perhaps on the line of Greenland and Iceland, and with Asia where now is Bering Strait. These connections were repeatedly made and repeatedly broken during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras down to the latest epoch, the Pleistocene. By comparing the fossil mammals of Europe with those of North America for any particular division of geological time.