191^- Reviews, 89 



sucli 9 view here {im[)erfect though it must be) pieced together from the 

 contents of the different chapters, and noticing only the largest of the 

 changes supposed to have played a part in the production of the present 

 fauna. 



Going back to Secondary times, for which the interest of Dr. Scharff's 

 story centres in South America, we find that he connects by trans-oceanic 

 britlges during the later stages of that vast period. Brazil with West 

 Africa, Patagonia with Australia, and Chile (by a route extending north 

 wards to California and thence bending east) with western Europe. 

 The first-mentioned of these three connections was already tending to 

 break up at the commencement of the Cretaceous period. The con- 

 nection between Patagonia and Australia is apparently believed to have 

 come somewhat later than the East Brazil to west Africa bridge — at 

 any rate it lasted well into Cretaceous days — and the circuitous bridge 

 from Chile via California to west Europe was of a still later date, and 

 lasted into early Tertiary times. South America as a Continent, how- 

 ever, had not then come into existence, eastern Brazil, at the time of its 

 connection with Africa, being entirely separated from both Chile and 

 Patagonia, as it seems to have still been when the two other great Cre- 

 taceous land bridges which either succeeded or survived it broke up 

 and disappeared. 



The beginning of the Tertiary Age thus finds at least a fragment of 

 North America (the south-western portion) connected by land simul- 

 taneously with western or southern Europe and with a detached western 

 portion of what is now the South American continent (the land bridge 

 to the latter including the much -vexed area of the Galapagos archipelago). 

 Dr. Scharft does not make it quite clear whether this connection between 

 south-west North America and Europe broke down and was renewed 

 again during an early stage of the Eocene Age, but he seems to imply 

 that it was so, since he tells us (p. 120) that the second faunal phase of 

 the Eocene period witnessed a simultaneous appearance of similar faunas 

 in those two regions, which must have been brought about by a land 

 connection that apparently had not existed during the earlier phase. 



In Oligocene times, European influence is traced again chiefly in South 

 America, but this time it is by a bridge which includes the Antilles, and 

 apparently does not touch the North American mainland, whose south- 

 eastern parts had not then come into existence, while the south-western 

 parts had probably ceased to be connected by the old Pacific land bridge 

 with either Ecuador or Chile as they had been in early Eocene days. 

 Later, in Miocene times. Dr. Scharfl draws a connection across the Pacific 

 between North America and Asia, by a line considerably further south than 

 that across Bering's Strait, which was only bridged at a much later date. 

 Coming on to the Pliocene period, we find two independent land bridges 

 traced from Europe, one from Lapland to the north of Greenland, and 

 the other, which probably lasted into Pleistocene days, forming a great 

 strip of land that embraced Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland, and southern 

 Greenland, stretching to Labrador, and thus communicating with the 

 north-eastern United States. 



