Discourses: Biological & Geological: EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Discourses: Biological & Geological: Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Biology; Geology
But it is very remarkable that while the Miocene fauna of the Arctogaeal
province, as a whole, is of the same character as the existing fauna of
the same province, as a whole, the component elements of the fauna were
differently associated. In the Miocene epoch, North America possessed
Elephants, Horses, Rhinoceroses, and a great number and variety of
Ruminants and Pigs, which are absent in the present indigenous fauna;
Europe had its Apes, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, Tapirs, Musk-deer,
Giraffes, Hyaenas, great Cats, Edentates, and Opossum-like Marsupials,
which have equally vanished from its present fauna; and in Northern
India, the African types of Hippopotamuses, Giraffes, and Elephants were
mixed up with what are now the Asiatic types of the latter, and with
Camels, and Semnopithecine and Pithecine Apes of no less distinctly
Asiatic forms.
In fact the Miocene mammalian fauna of Europe and the Himalayan regions
contains, associated together, the types which are at present separately
located in the South-African and Indian sub-provinces of Arctogaea. Now
there is every reason to believe, on other grounds, that both Hindostan,
south of the Ganges, and Africa, south of the Sahara, were separated by a
wide sea from Europe and North Asia during the Middle and Upper Eocene
epochs. Hence it becomes highly probable that the well-known
similarities, and no less remarkable differences between the present
Faunae of India and South Africa have arisen in some such fashion as the
following. Some time during the Miocene epoch, possibly when the
Himalayan chain was elevated, the bottom of the nummulitic sea was
upheaved and converted into dry land, in the direction of a line
extending from Abyssinia to the mouth of the Ganges. By this means, the
Dekhan on the one hand, and South Africa on the other, became connected
with the Miocene dry land and with one another. The Miocene mammals
spread gradually over this intermediate dry land; and if the condition of
its eastern and western ends offered as wide contrasts as the valleys of
the Ganges and Arabia do now, many forms which made their way into Africa
must have been different from those which reached the Dekhan, while
others might pass into both these sub-provinces.
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