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
coextensive 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.
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