128 GEOGRAPHICAL RELATIONS OF FOSSILS. [Ch. X. 



mals," has called attention to this law, remarking that the fossil 

 quadrupeds of Europe and Asia differ from those of Australia or 

 South America. We do not find, for example, ' in the Europaeo- 

 Asiatic province fossil kangaroos or armadillos, but the elephant, 

 rhinoceros, horse, bear, hyaena, beaver, hare, mole, and others, which 

 still characterize the same continent. 



In like manner, in the Pampas of South America the skeletons of 

 Megatherium, Megalonyx, Glyptodon, Mylodon, Toxodon, Macrau- 

 chenia, and other extinct forms, are analogous to the living sloth, 

 armadillo, cavy, capybara, and llama. The fossil quadrumana, also 

 associated with some of these forms in the Brazilian caves, belong 

 to the Platyrrhine family of monkeys, now peculiar to South Amer- 

 ica. That the extinct fauna of Buenos Ayres and Brazil was very 

 modem has been shown by its relation to deposits of marine shells, 

 agreeing with those now inhabiting the Atlantic ; and when in 

 Georgia, in 1845, I ascertained that the Megatherium, Mylodon, 

 Equus curvidens, and other quadrupeds a?lied to the Parnpean type, 

 collected by Mr. Hamilton Couper, were posterior in date to beds con- 

 taining marine shells belonging to forty-five recent species of the 

 neighboring sea. 



There are indeed some cosmopolite genera, such as the Mastodon 

 (a genus of the elephant family) and the horse, which were simul- 

 taneously represented by different fossil species in Europe, North 

 America, and South America ; but these few exceptions can by no 

 means invalidate the rule which has been thus expressed by Professor 

 Owen, that in " the highest organized class of annuals the same 

 forms were restricted to the same great provinces at the Pliocene 

 periods (and we may add Post-pliocene) as they are at the present day." 



However modern, in a geological point of view, we may consider 

 the Newer Pliocene and Post-pliocene epochs, it is evident that causes 

 more general and powerful than the intervention of man have occasioned 

 the disappearance of the ancient fauna from so many extensive re- 

 gions. Not a few of the species had a wide range ; the same Mega- 

 therium, for instance, extended from Patagonia and the river Plata in 

 South America, between latitudes 31° and 39° south, to correspond- 

 ing latitudes in North America, the same animal being also an inhabi- 

 tant of the intermediate country of Brazil, where its fossil remains 

 have been met with in caves. The mammoth (Elephas primigenius) 

 has been likewise found fossil in North America, and again in the 

 eastern hemisphere from Siberia to the south of Europe. If it be 

 objected that, notwithstanding the adaptation of such quadrupeds to a 

 variety of climates and geographical conditions, their great size ex- 

 posed them to extermination by the first hunter tribes, we may observe- 

 that the investigations of Lund and Clausen in the ossiferous limestone 

 caves of Brazil have demonstrated that these large mammalia were 

 associated with a great many smaller quadrupeds, some of them ab 

 diminutive as field-mice, which have all died out together, while the 



