The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-07-05
NEW HAVEN MORNING JOURNAL COURIER FRIDAY JULY 5

have been broken up into islands by the
 intrudlng sea In great land areas, continuous slow rising and falling has occurred, each area passing recur- rently through successive phases; arch ipelagoes have risen to be indented con-
 tinents, indented continents to be a
 continuous mass, and the whole has
 then slowly fallen back again to It's
 original condition, But the sea and the
 land In their broad masses remain as
 when first divided.
 What, then, Is the form of this sem
 piternal conflguration? In the minds
 of most of us 1t is vague image re-
 membered from a distorted "Mercator's
 Projection" or from the eastern and
 western hemispheres flattened on the
 pages of an atlas. These images are
 dimmed toward the poles, and so fail to
 give the most striking aspect of sea
 and land. But, taking globe, turn
 either pole alternately toward you. Tn
 the south clump of icebound land.
 well within the Atlantic circle, sur
 rounds the pole, All else is the wide
 domain of ocean, broken only by taper
 ing and isolated tongues of land, South
 America, the Cape, Australia, leaning
 down from the north. On the other
 hand, all the great continents expand
 Tn the northern hemisphere and shoul-
 der each other around the pole. Amer
 ica is separated from Asia only by the
 shallowest and narrowest of straits; an
 elevation of 0 few fathoms would
 unite Greenland with Europe, The
 great land area of the globe is as a cap
 thrown over the northern hemisphere,
 with only tattered fringes hanging
 across the equator to the south
 And where did terrestrial animals come into being? Tradition places
 their home eastward in Eden. Science
 points certainly to some part of the
 great northern land area as the center
 Of life for the larger terrestrial forms.
 We know that these arose successively,
 primitive birds like the ostriches com
 Ing before higher forms, like the pheas-
 ants and singing birds, the pouched
 marsupials preceding the antelopes and
 the lion, the lemurs coming before man like apes. Each wave of life, spread over the whole continuous area, produ- ing after it's kind: then, pressing around the northern hemisphere it met
 thousand different conditions of envi- ronments, different foods, enemies and climates, and broke up into different genera and species But there was never wave of life that had not an-
 other following it. Tn the struggle for existence between the older and newer type, generally the newer prevailed and drove the older southward toward the diverging fringes of the land masses. The vanquished left behind them on the field of battle only their bones to become fossils. Sometimes succeeding waves swept along to the extreme lim- it's of the land, and many early types were utterly destroyed But others found sanctuary In the ends of the south, and were preserved in islands broken off before the newer types had reached them, or saved their lives by becoming creatures of the night, dwell- ing in the fastnesses of tropical forests. Fossil bones of ostrich-like birds oc- cur in Europe and in Asia and in North America: their living representatives are the cassowaries of New Guinea, the emus of Australia, the ostriches of Africa, and the rheas of South America. The oldest mammals now alive, the duck-D1lled platypus and the Spiny echidna, layers of eggs, knsn1en of the reptiles, have allies among American and European fossils; in life they are found only in Australia and New Gui- nea. The pouched marsupials once ranged all over the earth, covering 1t with a strange mirnicry of existing
 mammals. Now they have been beaten out of Europe and Asia, even out of Af- rica. and almost entirely out of North America; but they have found refuge in South America. and, secluded in Aus tralia, they form nearly the whole of primitive fauna. So also with the le- murs; their fossil remains bestrew the
 whole earth. A few surviving forms
 remain In the forests of Africa and southern Asia; still more of them, shut
 off in Madagascar, have defied the ad- vent of newer rivals,