Chap. XI.] THKOUGHOUT THE WORLD. 101 



in Tierra del Fuego, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in 

 the peninsula of India. For at these distant points, 

 the organic remains in certain beds present an unmis- 

 takeable resemblance to those of the Chalk. It is not 

 that the same species are met with ; for in some cases 

 not one species is identically the same, but they be- 

 long to the same families, genera, and sections of 

 genera, and sometimes are similarly characterised in 

 such trifling points as mere superficial sculpture. More- 

 over, other forms, which are not found in the Chalk of 

 Europe, but which occur in the formations either above 

 or below, occur in the same order at these distant 

 points of the world. In the several successive palseo- 

 zoic formations of Paissia, Western Europe, and North 

 America, a similar parallelism in the forms of life has 

 been observed by several authors; so it is, according 

 to Lyell, with the European and North American 

 tertiary deposits. Even if the few fossil species which 

 are common to the Old and New Worlds were kept 

 wholly out of view, the general parallelism in the 

 successive forms of life, in the palaeozoic and tertiary 

 stages, would still be manifest, and the several forma- 

 tions could be easily correlated. 



These observations, however, relate to the marine 

 inhabitants of the world: we have not sufficient data 

 to judge whether the productions of the land and of 

 fresh water at distant points change in the same parallel 

 manner. We may doubt whether they have thus 

 changed : if the Megatherium, Mylodon, Macrauchenia, 

 and Toxodon had been brought to Europe from La 

 Plata, without any information in regard to their geo- 

 logical position, no one would have suspected that they 

 had co-existed with sea-shells all still living; but as 



