The great land masses of the northern hemisphere thus appear to have possessed between them all the higher types of animal life; and these seem to have been developed for a time in one continent and then to have been in part transferred by migration to the other, where alone they have sometimes maintained themselves. Thus, the elephants and the camels appear to have descended from what were once exclusively American types, while the opossums were as certainly European. Many groups, however, never passed out of the continent in which they originated--the civets, hyænas, and the giraffes being wholly eastern, while the Oreodontidæ and Brontotheridæ were no less exclusively western. South America seems to have been united to the northern continent once at least in Secondary or early Tertiary times, since it was inhabited in the Eocene period by many forms of mammalia, such as rodents, felines, and some ancient forms of Ungulata. It must also have possessed the ancestors of the Edentata (though they have not yet been discovered), or we should not find such a variety of strange and gigantic forms of this order in later Tertiary deposits in this part of the world only. During the greater part of the Tertiary period, therefore, South America must have been separated from the North and protected from incursions of the higher forms of mammalia which were there so abundant. Thus only does it seem possible to understand the unchecked development of so many large but comparatively helpless animals as the Edentata of the Pampas and the Brazilian caves--a development only comparable with that of the Australian marsupials, still more completely shut off from all competition with higher forms of life.