Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/82

lx demonstrate the necessity of the existence of all the great types of the Eocene epoch in some antecedent period.

It is this Mesozoic continent (which may well have lain in the neighbourhood of what are now the shores of the North Pacific Ocean) which I suppose to have been occupied by the Mesozoic Monodelphia; arid it is in this region that I conceive they must have gone through the long series of changes by which they were specialized into the forms which we refer to different orders. I think it very probable that what is now South America may have received the characteristic elements of its mammalian fauna during the Mesozoic epoch; and there can be little doubt that the general nature of the change which took place at the end of the Mesozoic epoch in Europe was the upheaval of the eastern and northern regions of the Mesozoic sea-bottom into a westward extension of the Mesozoic continent, over which the mammalian fauna, by which it was already peopled, gradually spread. This invasion of the land was prefaced by a previous invasion of the Cretaceous sea by modern forms of mollusca and fish.

It is easy to imagine how an analogous change might come about in the existing world. There is, at present, a great difference between the fauna of the Polynesian Islands and that of the west coast of America. The animals which are leaving their spoils in the deposits now forming in these localities are widely different. Hence, if a gradual shifting of the deep sea, which at present bars migration between the easternmost of these islands and America took place to the westward, while the American side of the sea- bottom was gradually upheaved, the palæontologist of the future would find, over the Pacific area, exactly such a change as I am supposing to have occurred in the North-Atlantic area at the close of the Mesozoic period. An Australian fauna would be found underlying an American fauna, and the transition from the one to the other would be as abrupt as that between the Chalk and lower Tertiaries; and as the drainage-area of the newly formed extension of the American continent gave rise to rivers and lakes, the mammals mired in their mud would differ from those of like deposits on the Australian side just as the Eocene mammals differ from those of the Purbecks.

How do similar reasonings apply to the other great change of life—that which took place at the end of the Palæozoic period?

In the Triassic epoch, the distribution of the dry land and of terrestrial vertebrate life appears to have been, generally, similar to that which existed in the Mesozoic epoch; so that the Triassic continents and their faunae seem to be related to the Mesozoic lands and their faunae, just as those of the Miocene epoch are related to those of the present day. In fact, as I have recently endeavoured to prove to the Society, there was an Arctogæal continent and an Arctogæal province of distribution in Triassic times as there is now; and the Sauropsida and Marsupialia which constituted that fauna were, I doubt not, the progenitors of the Sauropsida and Marsupialia of the whole Mesozoic epoch.