Chap. X. 
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. 
323 
America, in equatorial South America, in Tierra del 
Fuego, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in the peninsula 
of India. For at these distant points, the organic re¬ 
mains in certain beds present an unmistakeable degree 
of 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, but they belong 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 found in the Chalk of Europe, but 
which occur in the formations either above or below, are 
similarly absent at these distant points of the world. In 
the several successive palaeozoic formations of Eussia, 
Western Europe and North America, a similar parallel¬ 
ism in the forms of life has been observed by several 
authors : so it is, ’according to Lyell, with the several 
European and North American tertiary deposits. Even 
if the few fossil species which are common to the Old 
and New Worlds be kept wholly out of view, the general 
parallelism in the successive forms of life, in the stages 
of the widely separated palaeozoic and tertiary periods, 
would still be manifest, and the several formations 
could be easily correlated. 
These observations, however, relate to the marine in¬ 
habitants of distant parts of the world: we have not 
sufBcient data to judge whether the productions of the 
land and of fresh water change at distant points in the 
same parallel manner. We may doubt whether they 
have thus changed: if the Megatherium, Mylodon, 
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 still living sea-shells; but 
as these anomalous monsters co-existed with the Masto- 
