444 EXTINCTION OF SPECIES NOW IN PROGRESS. 



to the crested parrot, two other parrots, a dove, a large coot, an abnor- 

 mal starling, a ralline bird incapable of flight, and many others. The 

 Antilles have in the same way lost in the last century many macaws 

 and other species; while the garefowl, Alca impinnis, has disap- 

 peared along with the Labrador duck and the Philip Island parrot, 

 Nestor productus. Evidence of the process of extinction may be 

 traced in our own country, in the changed and more limited distri- 

 bution of the crane, spoonbill, capercailzie, bustard, &c. And if we 

 go back to the remains preserved in beds of peat, we add to our 

 British fauna the pelican, wolf, brown bear, roebuck, Bos pri mi- 

 genius, Bos frontosus, the Irish elk, and beaver, which were certainly 

 contemporary with man. Species have a life like individuals ; some 

 insects which live but a single season have been kept alive for many 

 years by preventing them from experiencing the change of temperature 

 under which reproduction and death occur. And so species by existing 

 under similar conditions may undergo little or no change, and survive 

 through long periods of geological time ; but as a rule, a species, how- 

 ever dominant it may become for a time, by immunity from enemies, 

 or organisms causing disease which have not become accustomed to 

 their new companion, sooner or later fails in physiological vitality if 

 it is exposed to the ordinary variable conditions of climate ; and then 

 disease attacks the species with fatal energy. Many instances might 

 be recorded of the wholesale death of mammals from drought, and 

 of fishes from poisoned water, which would parallel anything met with 

 among the strata. 



Sudden Destruction of Marine Animals. The extraordinary 

 abundance of fossils in some deposits, and the evidences of the sudden 

 death of others, do not imply any wholesale extinction of life, but 

 rather such destruction as occurs from time to time by natural agencies. 

 Professor Rupert Jones, E.RS., records several such phenomena. 

 Thus lobsters have been killed in the boxes in which they are kept 

 at the bottom of the sea at Stornoway by a heavy fall of rain in the 

 night. The octopus has been similarly cast on shore in immense 

 numbers after the passage to the sea of floods of snow water. The 

 great rains of the south-west monsoon kill thousands of fishes- and 

 other sea animals on the coast of India. Star-fishes and other marine 

 animals have been found killed on the south of Tobago by the fresh 

 waters of the Orinoco. Even the Yenisei in flood kills the deep-sea 

 fish of the Arctic Ocean. The fishes of the Jordan are similarly killed 

 when carried into the Dead Sea. The heat from volcanic eruptions 

 has killed fishes in all parts of the globe. A bank of crabs three 

 feet high was thrown up after an earthquake-shock in the Bay 

 of Payta in Peru. Storms sometimes kill millions of oysters, and 

 storms are probably the most destructive agents affecting fishes. 

 Occasionally the sea-bed is seen covered for acres with the dead sand- 

 lance and other fishes. Sometimes an epidemic affects fishes, and 

 salmon die in great numbers, and may even die under the influence of 

 unusual heat. By drying up the coast in estuaries, eels have been 

 killed in hot seasons on the coast of "France in sufficient numbers to 



