Page - 416 - in The Origin of Species

416 ORIGIN OF SPECIES mostly in a modified condition, in the central parts of Europe and the United States. On this view we can understand the relationship with very little identity, between the productions of North America and Europe,—a relationship which is highly remarkable, considering the distance of the two areas, and their separation by the whole Atlantic Ocean. We can further understand the singular fact remarked on by several observers that the productions of Europe and America dur- ing the later tertiary stages were more closely related to each other than they are at the present time; for during these warmer periods the northern parts of the Old and New Worlds will have been almost continuously united by land, serving as a bridge, since rendered impassable by cold, for the intermigration of their inhabitants. During the slowly decreasing warmth of the Pliocene period, as soon as the species in common, which inhabited the New and Old Worlds, migrated south of the Polar Circle, they will have been completely cut off from each other. This separation, as far as the more temperate produc- tions are concerned, must have taken place long ages ago. As the plants and animals migrated southward, they will have become mingled in the one great region with the native American productions, and would have had to compete with them; and in the other great region, with those of the Old World. Consequently we have here everything favourable for much modification,—for far more modification than with the Alpine productions, left isolated, within a much more recent period, on the several mountain-ranges and on the arctic lands of Europe and N. America. Hence it has come, that when we compare the now living productions of the tem- perate regions of the New and Old Worlds, we find very few identical species (though Asa Gray has lately shown that more plants are identical than was formerly supposed), but we find in every great class many forms, which some nat- uralists rank as geographical races, and others as distinct species ; and a host of closely allied or representative forms which are ranked by all naturalists as specifically distinct. As on the land, so in the waters of the sea, a slow south- ern migration of a marine fauna, which, during the Pliocene or even a somewhat earlier period, was nearly uniform along