GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS 



which is furnished by the camel family. This very peculiar 

 family consists of two sections. One section includes the 

 true camels of the Old World, whose present native habitat 

 appears to be Asia, for the only wild camels now in existence 

 are found solely in central Asia. The other section includes 

 the much smaller, lighter, and more graceful guanacos, 

 llamas, and like animals of South America. No one who 

 has studied the anatomy of the camels can doubt for a 

 moment that these two sections of the family are closely 

 related, despite the great differences in their external appear- 

 ance. The geological history of the family, as revealed by 

 fossils, shows that, for a long time during the Tertiary 

 period. North America was its only home, for during that 

 time the camels appear to have inhabited no other con- 

 tinent. Each successive group of rocky strata in our western 

 plains has yielded remains of its own characteristic types of 

 camels, whose development toward the modern type may be 

 followed through many almost imperceptible gradations, all 

 presumably arising by ordinary procreation. Later in the 

 Tertiary period the fossils record the arrival of camels in 

 Asia, on the one hand, and in South America on the other; 

 and finally, at a very late geological date, they completely 

 disappeared from North America. Their passage from 

 North America to Asia was made possible by the existence 

 of land connection where we now find the shallow Bering 

 Sea. This connection was often made and broken in past 

 ages. 



According to the doctrine of special creation the relation- 

 ship between the true camels and the llamas is not real but 

 purely ideal. The fossil camels, which seem to record suc- 

 cessive steps of development, all moving in the same direc- 

 tion, record only successive, disconnected acts of sudden 

 creation in a way of which we have had no experience, and 



[83] 



