780 ^ CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



continental connections with much the same finality as did the Origin of Species 

 for the necessity of the hypothesis of special creation. "Special Creation," in 

 1858, would have received an overwhelming majority vote from contemporary 

 biologists. 



A group of students in zoology and paleontology under William King Gregory 

 at the American Museum of Natural History in the years 1915 to 1927 came also 

 under the influence of W. D. Matthew, in whose personality great modesty and 

 simplicity stood out against the background of an enormous scientific prestige. 

 The group included Alfred Sherwood Romer, Charles Lewis Camp, and Gladwyn 

 Kingsley Noble, with many others, and a little more indirectly Emmett Reid 

 Dunn and myself. All of us have been involved in one way or another with the 

 problems of animal geography, and all of us have remained disciples of Matthew. 

 I was tempted to refer to my own commentary on Matthew ( 1943 ) as consisting 

 of "Parerga and Paralipomena"; we have tended to look a bit askance at those 

 "who knew not Matthew"; and it had not escaped some of our colleagues that 

 Matthew's work had become a kind of Holy Writ to his disciples. 



Fortunately we have now had a strong cross-light thrown on the main thesis 

 of Climate and Evolution by a nondisciple, P. J. Darlington, Jr., of the Museum 

 of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, who reviews the whole matter 

 from the evidence of the freshwater fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. These were 

 the groups of which Matthew had least personal knowledge. Darlington shows 

 that Matthew's account of these groups was quite inadequate and often erroneous, 

 and that some of their major dispersals came from the tropics instead of from the 

 northern continents; but he ends in essential agreement with Matthew in finding 

 the Bering Sea and Bering Strait bridge adequate to explain the dispersals 

 between the eastern and western hemispheres. The very important evidence of the 

 freshwater fishes, long regarded as a proof of the necessity for past direct connec- 

 tion of Africa and South America, is now regarded by George S. Myers as explain- 

 able by long-term round-about emigration via the Bering Bridge rather than 

 by hypothetical trans- Atlantic connections. Myers has more particularly analyzed 

 the freshwater fish fauna of the West Indies (1938) and of Madagascar. He 

 shows that the fish faunas of these two great island areas cannot possibly be 

 interpreted on the theory of connection with the adjacent continents. He rejects 

 anylate Mesozoic land connection of Australia with southeastern Asia on account 

 of the extreme impoverishment of the primary freshwater fish fauna of the 

 Australian region (1951). 



The important evidence from fossil plants has been presented and analyzed 

 most recently by North American paleobotanists (Chancy, 1947). So far as the 

 Cretaceous and Tertiary history is concerned, Chaney and Axelrod (to name 

 only two) completely reject theories of land connection other than that at Bering 

 Sea, and their account of the Tertiary history of the floras of the northern 

 hemisphere is in essential agreement with Matthew. 



One of the most striking relations between the recent faunas of South America 

 and Africa lies in the rich, and in some respects parallel, development of the 

 great group of worm-like lizards, the Amphisbaenidae. The group is wholly 

 unknown in the modern fauna in eastern Asia. It is therefore especially illumi- 

 nating that a fossil amphisbaenian of Oligocene age was discovered in Mongolia 

 by the expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. It was described 



