CREATION BY EVOLUTION
the present geographical arrangement of the members of the family bears no relation to its recorded geological history. Such an explanation seems to be altogether incredible, whereas the evolutionary explanation seems to be entirely adequate.
Extinction of Faunas
A great extinction of quadrupeds, which exterminated them over more than three-fifths of the land surface of the globe soon after the appearance of early Man in Europe, is an unexplained mystery. Nobody can yet say why there was such immense mortality among the huge and strange creatures that had roamed over all the continents. Whatever may have been the agent of destruction, it removed from North America a great variety of types, such as elephants and mastodons, many kinds of horses, bisons, tapirs, peccaries, camels and llamas, huge ground-sloths and giant armadillos (immigrants from South America) as well as giant wolves, great lion-like cats, and sabre-tooth tigers. It was this great extermination that put a gap of thousands of miles between the Asiatic and the South American section of the camel family by destroying them in the intervening areas.
Principal Areas of Geographic Distribution
It has long been customary to divide the lands of the earth into zoological regions in accordance with the animals that inhabit them. A map on which these regions are indicated by various tints appears to be a very irrational and arbitrary sort of thing. Few of the regions coincide with the continents. Australia and South America fall each into a single region, and Asia, Africa, and North America belong to two, or even three regions each. The northern part of North
[ 84 ]
