CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



are mammals of northern type, which compose the second 

 group mentioned above. This group includes the tapirs, the 

 peccaries (or wild swine), the guanacos and llamas, many 

 species of deer, cats great and small, wolves, skunks, weasels, 

 otters, and raccoon-like animals, together with North 

 American types of rodents, rabbits, squirrels, rats, mice, and 

 the like. Though some of the animals of this group are 

 obviously related to those of North America and Asia, nearly 

 all are assigned to different species from their relatives that 

 inhabit those regions, many even to peculiar genera. South 

 American wolves, for example, are in many ways peculiar 

 and must be placed in genera not found in other regions, but 

 that they are related to the northern wolves is indisputable, 

 whether we regard that relationship as ideal or real. If each 

 of these species was created separately, their distribution is 

 in no way explained by the history of the groups to which 

 they belong. If, on the other hand, they arose by natural 

 descent from a common ancestry, this history does explain 

 the distribution, and in a most convincing manner. 



Now let us go back to the time, in the middle of the Ter- 

 tiary period, in the Miocene epoch, when North and South 

 America were not connected, a fact demonstrated by the 

 geological record of Central America and the Isthmus of 

 Panama. We are now in a position to make a full and accu- 

 rate comparison of the quadrupeds of the two Americas at 

 that time because in Patagonia, on the one hand, and on our 

 Great Plains, on the other, we have immense areas of soft 

 rocks, accumulated at approximately the same time, which 

 have in both the Americas yielded large numbers of well- 

 preserved fossil mammals. The separation of the two con- 

 tinents at that time is reflected in the complete difference of 

 their mammals; in their mammalian life North and South 

 America had literally nothing in common. Miocene Pata- 



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