Discourses: Biological & Geological: EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Discourses: Biological & Geological: Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Biology; Geology
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 depauperised 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 Faunae 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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