EVIDENCE OF FOSSIL REMAINS 101 



Even as children we learn many facts of animal 

 distribution; every one knows that lions occur in 

 Africa and not in America, that tigers live in Asia 

 and Malaysia, that the jaguar is an inhabitant of the 

 Brazilian forests, and that the American puma or 

 mountain hon spreads from north to south and from 

 east to west throughout the American continents. 

 The occurrence of differing human races in widely 

 separated localities is no less familiar and striking, 

 for the red man in America, the Zulu in Africa, the 

 Mongol and Malay in their own territories, display 

 the same discontinuity in distribution that is character- 

 istic of all other groups of animals and of plants as 

 well. As our sphere of knowledge increases, we are 

 impressed more and more forcibly by the diversity 

 and unequal extent of the ranges occupied by the 

 members of every one of the varied divisions of the 

 organic world. Another fact which becomes sig- 

 nificant only when science calls our attention to it 

 is the absence from a land like Australia of higher 

 mammals such as the rabbit of Europe. The hy- 

 pothesis of special creation cannot explain this absence 

 on the assumption that the rabbit is unsuited to the 

 conditions obtaining in the country named, for when 

 the species was introduced into Australia by man, 

 it developed and spread with marvelous rapidity and 

 destructive effect. It may seem impossible that facts 

 like these could possess an evolutionary significance, 

 but they are actual examples of the great mass of data 

 brought together by the naturalists who have seen in 

 them something to be interpreted, and who have sought 

 and found an explanation in the formularies of science. 



