The fact that this immense fauna of Miocene Arctogaea is now fully
and richly represented only in India and in South Africa, while it
is shrunk and depauperized in North Asia, Europe, and North America,
becomes at once intelligible, if we suppose that India and South
Africa had but a scanty mammalian population before the Miocene
immigration, while the conditions were highly favourable to the new
comers. It is to be supposed that these new regions offered themselves
to the Miocene Ungulates, as South America and Australia offered
themselves to the cattle, sheep, and horses of modern colonists. But,
after these great areas were thus peopled, came the Glacial epoch,
during which the excessive cold, to say nothing of depression and
ice-covering, must have almost depopulated all the northern parts of
Arctogaea, destroying all the higher mammalian forms, except those
which, like the Elephant and Rhinoceros, could adjust their coats to
the altered conditions. Even these must have been driven away from the
greater part of the area; only those Miocene mammals which had passed
into Hindostan and into South Africa would escape decimation by such
changes in the physical geography of Arctogaea. And when the northern
hemisphere passed into its present condition, these lost tribes of the
Miocene Fauna were hemmed by the Himalayas, the Sahara, the Red Sea,
and the Arabian deserts, within their present boundaries. Now, on the
hypothesis of evolution, there is no sort of difficulty in admitting
that the differences between the Miocene forms of the mammalian
Fauna and those which exist at present are the results of gradual
modification; and, since such differences in distribution as obtain
are readily explained by the changes which have taken place in the
physical geography of the world since the Miocene epoch, it is clear
that the result of the comparison of the Miocene and present Fauna is
distinctly in favour of evolution. Indeed I may go further. I may
say that the hypothesis of evolution explains the facts of Miocene,
Pliocene, and Recent distribution, and that no other supposition even
pretends to account for them. It is, indeed, a conceivable supposition
that every species of Rhinoceros and every species of Hyaena, in the
long succession of forms between the Miocene and the present species,
was separately constructed out of dust, or out of nothing, by
supernatural power; but until I receive distinct evidence of the fact,
I refuse to run the risk of insulting any sane man by supposing that
he seriously holds such a notion.
Let us now take a step further back in time, and inquire into the
relations between the Miocene Fauna and its predecessor of the Upper
Eocene formation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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