MONSTROSITIES 311 



If these flowering plants existed on this lost continent, one 

 does not quite understand how their seeds could have been pre- 

 vented from getting disseminated to both the Old and New World 

 before this supposed migration took place. One can understand 

 that a certain number of seeds went over with the animals attached 

 to their hair, but what could have prevented the migration of seeds 

 before the migration of animals from this lost continent ? This is the 

 part of the theory that would seem to require some explanation. 



Then Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace seems to insist that no great 

 changes in the continental and oceanic configuration have occurred. 



There is another point of importance in this discussion. ' It 

 is a remarkable phenomenon,' says Sir J. William Dawson,^ ' in the 

 history of genera of plants in the Mesozoic and Tertiary, that the 

 older genera appear at once in a great number of specific types, 

 which become reduced as well as limited in range down to the 

 modern. This is, nO doubt, connected with the greater differentia- 

 tion of local conditions in the modern ; but it indicates also a law 

 of rapid multiplication of species in the early life of genera.' 



What is the cause of this rapid multiplication of species in the 

 early life of genera ? 



From what we know of heredity, it is a great controller of 

 form, and therefore in those days there must have been some 

 efficient disturber of heredity. Teratogeny may yet throw light on 

 this puzzling question. Hybrids between two genera are certainly 

 not unknown in modern horticulture, and hybrids between two 

 species are common enough ; and it is not impossible that a large 

 proportion of this puzzle may be due to words. The older 

 botanists may have given generic names to forms which were no 

 more A\s,\!v!\c'i, physiologically, than what we now call varieties. It 

 seems to me that the theory of a sunken Pacific continent in no 



1 P. 222, op. cit. 



