﻿part 1] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxvii 



and, as these specializations are not altogether the same in the two 

 cases, it is probable that they have arisen indejjendently. Again, 

 Miolania is a senile heavily-armoured form of the Pleurodiran 

 Tortoises, which had a universal distribution in the late Secondary 

 and early Tertiary Eras. The arrangement of the bony bosses 

 on the skull is not absolutely the same in the species from 

 Australia and Patagonia, and these indubitable marks of racial 

 old-age may therefore have been acquired by separate groups' in 

 different regions. In other words, the essential identity of these 

 land-animals does not prove a former direct connexion between 

 Australia and South America ; they may be merely survivors of 

 cosmopolitan races at the two extremes of their former range, 

 with certain inevitable marks of senility. In making comparisons, 

 indeed, it is not enough to distinguish the fundamental and 

 merely adaptive characters of animals ; it is also essential to note 

 separately those characters which depend on the early, mature, or 

 senile position of the particular animals in the evolving series to 

 which they belong. 



In the present state of our knowledge there seems to be only 

 one case in which we begin to have materials for forming a judg- 

 ment as to whether fundamental advances — the ' expression points ' 

 of Cope — occur more than once. I refer to the acquisition of 

 warm blood and its correlatives or consequences which started the 

 career of the mammals. The only reptiles that ever made a close 

 approach to mammals in their skeleton existed during the Permian 

 and Triassic Periods, and they were precisely intermediate between 

 the Palaeozoic Amphibia and the Mesozoic Mammalia. It is 

 therefore, presumably in Permo-Triassic times that mammals 

 arose. These intermediate or Theromorph reptiles, however, were 

 spread widely over many lands. Their remains were first found in 

 the Karoo formation of South Africa, were afterwards recognized 

 in India, Scotland, Northern Kussia, and Central Europe, and also 

 proved to occur in great numbers in the Permian of North America. 

 Traces of them have also been met with in Southern Brazil. The 

 African, Asiatic, and European remains belong to animals so closely 

 similar, that it is probable that they lived on a continuous land- 

 area; but the American forms, although in the beginning not 

 unlike, soon began to evolve into several groups which are almost 

 or completely unknown in the Old World. The American Thero- 

 morphs, therefore, probably flourished in isolation. Large collec- 

 tions from both regions have been studied during recent years bv 



e2 ' 



