THE ANIMAL WORLD OF BRAZIL 



occasional and fortuitous displacements. For the similarity of the 

 basic forms of animal life in South America and the other continents 

 is so great that we cannot assume that they all emerged in complete 

 mutual isolation. 



For example, there are Tapirs, pachyderms with short trunks, in 

 India and in South America (Plate 27). It speaks for the conceal- 

 ment in which these animals live that the large Saddlebacked 

 Tapir was discovered in the old, civilized country of India very much 

 later than the Anta of Brazil. It would puzzle us completely to say 

 how these creatures should occur at two opposite points of the 

 globe, and nowhere else, had not palaeontology told us that the 

 Tapirs were formerly distributed over the whole of the northern 

 hemisphere, and that the Prototapirus, regarded as the ancestral 

 form of the group, occurred in the early Tertiary period, in North 

 America and Europe. Thence, apparently, the Tapir wandered 

 southwards. 



In the same way the great naturalist Cuvier discovered in the 

 strata surrounding Paris a fragment of bone which he attributed 

 to a marsupial ; an attribution which caused a great sensation at the 

 time, for it was known that living marsupials were found only in 

 America and Australia. The Camel tribe is to-day represented in 

 Asia and Africa by the Camel, in South America by the Llama. 

 The connection between the two countries is to be found in North 

 America, where the Camelidae were represented in the early 

 Tertiary. Certain of the Tortoises, too, had northern ancestors, and 

 so had the great Iguanas, and in Europe, during the Tertiary period, 

 crocodiles, pythons, lions, elephants, hippopotami, parrots, and all 

 sorts of other creatures occurred, whose descendants are now found 

 only in southern latitudes. During this epoch, apparently, the 

 climate of Europe was warm. The palm-trees which are found in the 

 Tertiary deposits confirm this assumption. 



Insects lead us to the same conclusion. The termites or "white 

 ants" — known in Brazil as Cupim — and of which more than 400 

 species are living to-day, exclusively in the tropics, are found in the 

 amber of the Baltic. The great Water-bugs of India and Brazil 

 existed in Bavaria in the Tertiary deposits, and the spiders and 

 snakes afford similar examples. 



It looks as though the original home of a great part of the animal 

 world should be sought in the northern hemisphere, in the Tertiary 

 period, which, with its warm climate and the manifold variety of 

 its surface, afforded possibilities of the emergence of the greatest 



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