106 
GEOLOGY OF NORTH CAROLINA. 
underlying causal conditions and relations of climate, as well as of the 
outgrowing vegetable adjustments. What the original fauna of North 
Carolina may have been, how rich and various and abundant, betore the 
balance of nature was disturbed by the civilizing and exterminating hand 
of man, will never be fully known. But it is well enough ascertained 
that many of the larger animals which are now found only on the other 
side of the Mississippi, or in the Rocky Mountains, as the elk and the 
buffalo, once pastured in the open woods and the rich mountain meadows 
of the State ; and the traditions of the last of their retreating columns still 
linger among the older inhabitants of the mountain region. These may 
serve as an illustration of changes wide and great which have affected the 
whole animal kingdom, and make it, as we Row see it, something vastly 
different from what the first European settlers found. 
But there is left enough to record in a very impressive manner the 
bearing of the peculiar climatography of the State. When Agassiz under- 
took the study of the animal life of this continent, he had no sooner be- 
gun his collections from the Middle and Southern Atlantic States than the 
transitional character of the North Carolina fauna attracted his attention ; 
and he found, as the botanists had done earlier, that the limits of north- 
ern and southern species meet and overlap along this median area. 
And more singular still, on account of the peculiar conformation of the 
coast line and its relations to the great oceanic currents, already adverted 
to, the limitations of the range of the animal population of the sea are 
even more sharply defined by the far-projecting Cape of Ilatteras than is 
either flora or fauna of the land. This will be apparent on opening any 
work on marine conchology, for example, in which the range of species 
is defined ; the most common, the continually recurring definitions are, 
Massachusetts to North Carolina , Cape Cod to Cape Ilatteras , North 
Carolina to West Indies , Florida to North Carolina. 
These points are noticed, not merely as a matter of curious interest, but 
because they have a profound significance when considered in their proper 
connection. 
