Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/377

 entered by the route of Kamchatka and Alaska, where the climate, even now so much milder and more equable than on the north-east of America, might have been warm enough in late Pliocene times to have allowed the migration of these animals. In Asia they were driven southwards by the competition of numerous higher and more powerful forms, but have found a last resting-place in the swampy forests of the Malay region.

Now these two cases, of the marsupials and the tapirs, are in the highest degree instructive, because they show us that, without any hypothetical bridging of deep oceans, and with only such changes of sea and land as are indicated by the extent of the comparatively shallow seas surrounding and connecting the existing continents, we are able to account for the anomaly of allied forms occurring only in remote and widely separated areas. These examples really constitute crucial tests, because, of all classes of animals, mammalia are least able to surmount physical barriers. They are obviously unable to pass over wide arms of the sea, while the necessity for constant supplies of food and water renders sandy deserts or snow-clad plains equally impassable. Then, again, the peculiar kinds of food on which alone many of them can subsist, and their liability to the attacks of other animals, put a further check upon their migrations. In these respects almost all other organisms have great advantages over mammals. Birds can often fly long distances, and can thus cross arms of the sea, deserts, or mountain ranges; insects not only fly, but are frequently carried great distances by gales of wind, as shown by the numerous cases of their visits to ships hundreds of miles from land. Reptiles, though slow of movement, have advantages in their greater capacity for enduring hunger or thirst, their power of resisting cold or drought in a state of torpidity, and they have also some facilities for migration across the sea by means of their eggs, which may be conveyed in crevices of timber or among masses of floating vegetable matter. And when we come to the vegetable kingdom, the means of transport are at their maximum, numbers of seeds having special adaptations