ix.J PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 215 



lignite might accumulate over the sinking land. Let 

 upheaval of the whole now take place, in such a manner 

 as to bring the emerging land into continuity with the 

 South-American or Australian continent, and, in course 

 of time, it would be peopled by an extension of the 

 fauna of one of these two regions just as I imagine 

 the European Permian dry land to have been peopled. 



I see nothing whatever against the supposition that 

 distributional provinces of terrestrial life existed in the 

 Devonian epoch, inasmuch as M. Barrande has proved 

 that they existed much earlier. I am aware of no reason; 

 for doubting that, as regards the grades of terrestrial, 

 life contained in them, one of these may have been 

 related to another as New Zealand is to Australia, or as 

 Australia is to India, at the present day. Analogy seems 

 to me to be rather in favour of, than against, the sup- 

 position that while only Ganoid fishes inhabited the fresh, 

 waters of our Devonian land, Amphibia and Reptilia, 

 or even higher forms, may have existed, though we have 

 not yet found them. The earliest Carboniferous Amphi- 

 bia now known, such as Anthracosaurus, are so highly 

 specialized that I can by no means conceive that they 

 have been developed out of piscine forms in the interval 

 between the Devonian and the Carboniferous periods, 

 considerable as that is. And I take refuge in one of 

 two alternatives : either they existed in our own area 

 during the Devonian epoch and we have simply not yet 

 found them ; or they formed part of the population of 

 some other distributional province of that day, and only 

 entered our area by migration at the end of the Devonian 

 epoch. Whether Reptilia and Mammalia existed along 

 with them is to me, at present, a perfectly open question, 

 which is just as likely to receive an affirmative as a 

 negative answer from future inquirers. 



Let me now gather together the threads of my argu- 



