Chapter VI. The Testimony of Paleontological Zoölogy

Paradise Found, by William F. Warren, [1885], at sacred-texts.com

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CHAPTER VI.

THE TESTIMONY OF PALEONTOLOGICAL ZOÖLOGY.

All the evidence at our command points to the Northern hemisphere as the birth-place of the class, Mammalia, and probably of all the orders.—Alfred Russel Wallace.

C’est à des émigrations venues, sinon du pôle, du moins des contrées attenantes au cercle polaire, qu’il faut attribuer la présence constatée dans les deux mondes de beaucoup d’animaux propres à l’hémisphère boréal.—Count Saporta.

But in settling the site of Eden the animal kingdom must also have a voice. According to the Hebrew story, the representatives of this kingdom were an earlier creation than Adam, and in Eden was the world-fest of their christening. Evidently the lost cradle of humanity must be fixed in time posterior to the beginnings of animal life, and in space so located that from that spot as a centre all the multitudinous species, and genera, and orders, and families of the whole animal creation might have radiated forth to the various habitats in which they are respectively found.

Now it is one of the striking facts connected with Zoölogy that if we pass around the globe on any isothermal line, at the equator, or in any latitude south of it, or in any latitude north of it,—until we come to the confines of the Arctic zone,—we find, as we pass from land to land, that the animals we encounter are specifically unlike. Everywhere we find, along with like climatic and telluric conditions, different animals. The moment, however, we reach

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the Arctic zone, and there make the circuit of the globe, we are everywhere surrounded by the same species.

On the other hand, if we take great circles of the earth's longitude, and pass from the Arctic region down along the continental masses of the New World to the South Pole, thence returning up a meridian which crosses Africa and Europe, or Australia and Asia, we shall find in the descent abundant fossil evidence that we are moving forward on the pathway along which the prehistoric migrations of the animal world proceeded; while on our return on the other side of the planet we shall find that we are no longer following in the track of ancient migrations, but are advancing counter to their obvious movement. All this is as true of the flora of the world as it is of the fauna. Hence the language of the late Professor Orton: "Only around the shores of the Arctic Sea are the same animals and plants found through every meridian, and in passing southward along the three principal lines of land specific identities give way to mere identity of genera; these are replaced by family resemblances, and at last even the families become in a measure distinct, not only on the great continents, but also on the islands, till every little rock in the ocean has its peculiar inhabitants." ¹

Another well-known naturalist says: "It should also be observed that in the beginning of things the continents were built up from North to South,—such has been, at least, the history of the North and South American and the Europeo-Asiatic and the African continents; and thus it would appear that north of

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the equator, at least, animals slowly migrated southward, keeping pace as it were with the growth and southward extension of the grand land-masses which appeared above the sea in the Paleozoic ages. Hence, scanty as is the Arctic and Temperate region of the earth at the present time, in former ages these regions were as prolific in life as the tropics now are, the latter regions, now so vast, having through all the Tertiary and Quaternary ages been undisturbed by great geological revolutions, and meanwhile been colonized by emigrants driven down by the incoming cold of the glacial period." ¹

As long ago as 1876 Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, "All the chief types of animal life appear to have originated in the great north temperate or northern continents, while the southern continents have been more or less completely isolated during long periods, both from the northern continent and from each other." ² And again, speaking of mammalia, he said, "All the evidence at our command points to the Northern Hemisphere as the birthplace of the class, and probably of all the orders." ³

From all the facts but one conclusion is possible, and that is that like as the Arctic Pole is the mother-region of all plants, so it is the mother-region of all animals,—the region where, in the beginning, God created every beast of the earth after his kind, and

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cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth on the earth after his kind. And this is the conclusion now being reached and announced by all comparative zoölogists who busy themselves with the problem of the origin and prehistoric distribution of the animal world. But to believe that Professor Heer's "Miocene Arctic Continent" was the cradle of all floral types and the cradle of all faunal forms, and yet deny that it was also the cradle of the human race, is what few philosophical minds are likely long to do.

Footnotes

94:1 Comparative Zoölogy. New York, 1876: p. 384.

95:1 A. S. Packard, Zoölogy. New York, 2d ed., 1880: p. 665.—In his Elements of Geology, New York, 1877, p. 159, Le Conte gives a graphical representation of the polocentric zones of the earth's flora and fauna (Fig. 131), which ought to have suggested the true genetic connection of the whole.

95:2 The Geographical Distribution of Animals. New York ed., vol. i., p. 173.

95:3 Ibid., vol. ii., p. 544.