CHAPTER VI

Summary

Although in speculating on “ philosophical possibilities,” said Buffon, the same temperature might have been expected, all other circumstances being equal, to produce the same beings in different parts of the globe, both in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, yet it is an undoubted fact that when America was discovered, its indigenous quadrupeds were all dissimilar from those previously known in the old world. The elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the cameleopard, the camel, the dromedary, the buffalo, the horse, the ass, the lion, the tiger, the apes, the baboons, and a number of other mammalia, where nowhere to be met with on the new continent; while in the old, the American species, of the same great class, were nowhere to be seen-the tapir, the lama, the pecari, the jaguar, the couguar, the agouti, the paca, the coati, and the sloth.

These phenomena, although few in number relatively to the whole animate creation, were so striking and so positive in their nature, that the French naturalist caught sight at once of a general law in the geographical distribution of organic beings, namely, the limitation of groups of distinct species to regions separated from the rest of the globe by certain natural barriers. It was, therefore, in a truly philosophical spirit that, relying on the clearness of the evidence obtained respecting the larger quadrupeds, he ventured to call in question the identifications announced by some contemporary naturalists, of species of animals said to be common to the southern extremities of America and Africa.