The Greater Number, If Not All,
Of These Extinct Quadrupeds Lived At A Late Period, And Were
The Contemporaries Of Most Of The Existing Sea-Shells.
Since
they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can
have taken place.
What, then, has exterminated so many
species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly
hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus
to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia,
in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America
up to Behring's Straits, we must shake the entire framework
of the globe. An examination, moreover, of the geology of
La Plata and Patagonia, leads to the belief that all the
features of the land result from slow and gradual changes. It
appears from the character of the fossils in Europe, Asia,
Australia, and in North and South America, that those conditions
which favour the life of the _larger_ quadrupeds were
lately co-extensive with the world: what those conditions
were, no one has yet even conjectured. It could hardly have
been a change of temperature, which at about the same time
destroyed the inhabitants of tropical, temperate, and arctic
latitudes on both sides of the globe. In North America we
positively know from Mr. Lyell, that the large quadrupeds
lived subsequently to that period, when boulders were
brought into latitudes at which icebergs now never arrive:
from conclusive but indirect reasons we may feel sure, that
in the southern hemisphere the Macrauchenia, also, lived
long subsequently to the ice-transporting boulder-period.
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