Chap. XL] THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. 101 



in Tierra del Fuego, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in 

 the peninsula of India. For at these distant points, 

 the organic remains in certain beds present an unmis- 

 takeable resemblance to those of the Chalk. It is not 

 that the same species are met with; for in some cases 

 not one species is identically the same, hut they he- 

 long to the same families, genera, and sections of genera, 

 and sometimes are similarly characterised in such trifling 

 points as mere superficial sculpture. Moreover, other 

 forms, which are not fgund in the Chalk of Europe, 

 but which occur in the formations either above or be- 

 low, occur in the same order at these distant points 

 of the world. In the several successive palaeozoic for- 

 mations of Eussia, Western Europe, and North America, 

 a similar parallelism in the forms of life has been ob- 

 served by several authors; so it is, according to Lyell, 

 with the European and North American tertiary de- 

 posits. Even if the few fossil species which are com- 

 mon to the Old and New Worlds were kept wholly out 

 of view, the general parallelism in the successive forms 

 of life, in the palaeozoic and tertiary stages, would still 

 be manifest, and the several formations could be easily 

 correlated. 



These observations, however, relate to the marine 

 inhabitants of the world: we have not sufficient data 

 to judge whether the productions of the land and of 

 fresh water at distant points change in the same parallel 

 manner. We may doubt whether they have thus 

 changed: if the Megatherium, Myiodon, Macrauchenia, 

 and Toxodon had been brought to Europe from La Plata, 

 without any information in regard to their geological 

 position, no one would have suspected that they had co- 

 existed with sea-shells all still living; but as these 



