BRACHIOPOD A— 1 THOMSON. 
61 
Kaikoura deformations New Zealand and Australia passed through glacial climates, not 
very pronounced but with a much greater development of glaciers than exists at the 
present day. 
If this view of the geological history of the circum-Pacific lands is sustained, 
former land connections between them are most to be expected in the late Jurassic or 
early Cretaceous and in the late Pliocene and post-Tertiary, but not in the Oligocene- 
Miocene. The distribution of the land faunas and floras negatives any land con¬ 
nections by means of the Kaikoura deformations, and with this the specific distinctness 
of the coastal brachiopod faunas stands in agreement. The former connections that 
are demanded by the distribution of the brachiopods as well as of land animals must 
have been due to the post-Hokonui deformation. 
According to the diastrophic theory, periods of climacteric diastrophism are 
periods of climatic diversity and provincial faunas with restrictional evolution, while 
the period of early base-levelling is a period of rapidly-expanding and competing faunas, 
giving rise to cosmopolitan faunas at the period of climacteric base-levelling. 
Unfortunately little is known of the brachiopods of southern lands in the 
Cretaceous and Eocene. The cosmopolitan faunas of the period of climacteric base¬ 
levelling and maximum sea transgression, the Oligocene-Miocene, fail because by this 
time the southern rim of the Pacific had broken down Only a very few species attain 
a cosmopolitan distribution, and the presence of these demands that the connections 
remained effective almost till the Oligocene-Miocene. 
