Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/81

Rh There is nothing, then, in what is known of the older Eocene mammals of the Arctogæal province to forbid the supposition that they stood in an ancestral relation to those of the Calcaire Grossier and the Gypsum of the Paris basin, and that our present fauna, therefore, is directly derived from that which already existed in Arctogæa at the commencement of the Tertiary period. But if we now cross the frontier between the Cainozoic and the Mesozoic faunæ, as they are preserved within the Arctogæal area, we meet with an astounding change, and what appears to be a complete and unmistakable break in the line of biological continuity.

Among the twelve or fourteen species of Mammalia which are said to have been found in the Purbecks, not one is a member of the orders Chiroptera, Rodentia, Ungulata, or Carnivora, which are so well represented in the tertiaries. No Insectivora are certainly known, nor any opossum-like Marsupials. Thus there is a vast negative difference between the Cainozoic and the Mesozoic mammalian faunæ of Europe. But there is a still more important positive difference, inasmuch as all these Mammalia appear to be Marsupials belonging to Australian groups, and thus appertaining to a different distributional province from the Eocene and Miocene marsupials, which are Austro-Columbian. So far as the imperfect materials which exist enable a judgment to be formed, the same law appears to have held good for all the earlier Mesozoic Mammalia. Of the Stonesfield slate mammals, one, Amphitherium, has a definitely Australian character; one, Phascolotherium, may be either Dasyurid or Didelphine; of a third, Stereognathus, nothing can at present be said. The two mammals of the Trias, also, appear to belong to Australian groups.

Every one is aware of the many curious points of resemblance between the marine fauna of the European Mesozoic rocks and that which now exists in Australia. But if there was this Australian facies about both the terrestrial and the marine faunæ of Mesozoic Europe, and if there is this unaccountable and immense break between the fauna of Mesozoic and that of Tertiary Europe, is it not a very obvious suggestion that, in the Mesozoic epoch, the Australian province included Europe, and that the Arctogæal province was contained within other limits? The Arctogæal province is at present enormous, while the Australian is relatively small. Why should not these proportions have been different during the Mesozoic epoch?

Thus I am led to think that by far the simplest and most rational mode of accounting for the great change which took place in the living inhabitants of the European area at the end of the Mesozoic epoch is the supposition that it arose from a vast alteration of the physical geography of the globe, whereby an area long tenanted by Cainozoic forms was brought into such relations with the European area that migration from the one to the other became possible, and took place on a great scale.

This supposition relieves us, at once, from the difficulty in which we were left, some time ago, by the arguments which I used to