Page:The origin of continents and oceans - Wegener, tr. Skerl - 1924.djvu/106

80 The run of these figures agrees very well with those given by the voting shown in Fig. 15, according to which the majority of specialists assumed land connections in the Carboniferous, in the Trias, then only in the Lower and not the Upper Jurassic, but again from the Upper Cretaceous to the lower Tertiary. The agreement in the Carboniferous is extremely well emphasized, possibly because the fauna is more completely known. The fauna of the European and the North American Carboniferous has been subjected to just as much detailed examination as the flora by Dawson, Bertrand, Walcott, Ami, Salter, Klebelsberg, and others. The last-mentioned has, in particular, referred to the faunal similarity of the intercalated marine beds in the coal-bearing strata from Donetz, through Upper Silesia, Ruhr district, Belgium, England, on to the west of North America, which is very remarkable owing to their short range of time. In these the similarity is not confined to such elements as have a world-wide distribution. We cannot go into any further details. The absence of identical species of reptiles in the Pliocene and Quaternary is a natural effect of the cold, which destroyed the old reptilian fauna. The mammals present a similar history to the reptiles from the time of their entrance into the earth’s history. The agreement was especially great in the Eocene. Thus Ubisch says: “In the Eocene we also find in Europe practically all the same sub-orders of mammals as in America. The case of other classes is similar.” The decrease in the affinities