The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 53, March, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 53, March, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
while the embryological development of the higher ones recalls in the
younger condition of the germ the same peculiar character. I might
multiply examples, and draw equally striking illustrations from the
other classes; and though these correspondences cannot be fully
established while our knowledge of the embryological growth of animals
is so scanty, and information about their geological succession, yet
wherever we have been able to trace the connected history of any group
of animals in time, and to compare it with the history of their
embryological development and their structural relations as they exist
to-day, the correspondence is found to be so complete that we are
justified in believing that it will not fail in other instances. I may
add that a gradation of exactly the same character controls the
geographical distribution of animals over the surface of the globe. Here
again I must beg my readers to take much of the evidence, which, if
expanded, would fill a volume, for granted, since it would be entirely
inappropriate here. But I may briefly state that animals are not
scattered over the surface of our globe at random, but that they are
associated together in what are called _faunæ_, and that these
faunæ have their homes within certain districts--called by naturalists
_zoölogical provinces_. The limits of these provinces are
absolutely fixed, in the ocean as well as on the land, by certain
physical conditions connected with climate, with altitude, with the
pressure of the atmosphere, the weight of the water, etc.; and this is
true even for animals of migratory habits, for all such migrations are
periodical, and have boundaries as definite and impassable as those that
limit the permanent homes of animals. There is a certain series
established by the relations between different kinds of animals, as thus
distributed over the globe, which agrees with the gradation in their
rank, their growth, and their succession in time;--the law which
distributes animals in successive faunæ, and in accordance both with
their relative superiority or inferiority, and with the physical
conditions essential to their existence, being the same as that which
controls their structural relations, their embryological development,
and their succession in time.
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