Note also, in this connection, that along with a wonderful persistence of
type, with change of species, genera, orders, etc., from formation to
formation, no species and no higher group which has once unequivocally died
out ever afterward reappears. Why is this, but that the link of generation
has been sundered? Why, on the hypothesis of independent originations, were
not failing species recreated, either identically or with a difference, in
regions eminently adapted to their well-being? To take a striking case.
That no part of the world now offers more suitable conditions for wild
horses and cattle than the pampas and other plains of South America, is
shown by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously
multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. There was no
wild American stock. Yet in the times of the mastodon and megatherium, at
the dawn of the present period, wild-horses--certainly very much like the
existing horse--roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of
original and direct created adaptation of species to climate and other
conditions, why were they not reproduced, when, after the colder
intervening era, those regions became again eminently adapted to such
animals? Why, but because, by their complete extinction in South America,
the line of descent was there utterly broken? Upon the ordinary hypothesis,
there is no scientific explanation possible of this series of facts, and of
many others like them. Upon the new hypothesis, "the succession of the same
types of structure within the same areas during the later geological
periods ceases to be mysterious, and is simply explained by inheritance."
Their cessation is failure of issue.
Along with these considerations the fact (alluded to on page 98) should be
remembered that, as a general thing, related species of the present age are
geographically associated. The larger part of the plants, and still more of
the animals, of each separate country are peculiar to it; and, as most
species now flourish over the graves of their by-gone relatives of former
ages, so they now dwell among or accessibly near their kindred species.
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