TERTIARY FAUNA. 241 
ber of Carnivora, resembling the Viverrida (polecats, 
martens, &c.) and hyenas, and as viverride exist in 
Africa as well as in Asia, and as, moreover, the musk 
ruminants represented in this primitive fauna are 
now likewise Asiatic and African, and, finally, as the 
French opossums of those ages still live in Central and 
South America, “we gain an impression that the most 
ancient Tertiary fauna of Europe is the source of a 
truly continental animal society now represented in the 
tropical zone of both worlds, but most emphatically in 
Africa.” 
Far more heterogeneous is the picture of the higher 
animal life of the middle and more recent Tertiary 
periods which we reconstruct from the numerous and in 
parts highly prolific repositories of these remains. To 
draw narrower limits within these periods is imprac- 
ticable ; from place to place, from stratum to stratum, 
there is coherence ; nowhere does a species appear that 
might not be derived from another; and our authority 
says that anatomy, morphology, paleontology, and geo- 
graphical distribution, seemed to impress no doctrine 
upon him with such energy and pertinacity as that 
separate species of a genus, species without any historical 
and therefore without any previous local link to any 
original stock, do not exist.” The most celebrated 
repository of Tertiary mammals is Pikermi, a short 
distance from Athens, an accumulation of skeletons 
complete and in fragments, which pre-supposes a pro- 
fusion of animals, of which at any rate the most densely 
inhabited regions of Africa may, according to Living- 
stone’s descriptions, give us an idea. 
Again the Carnivora give way to the Graminivora, 
