I quote again from Dana:
"Thus the brute races of the Middle Quaternary on all the continents exceeded the moderns greatly in magnitude. Why, no one has explained."[87]
This was in 1875. In the last edition of his "Manual," published shortly after his death, he has this to say in addition:
"A species thrives best in the region of fittest climate. In the Pleistocene, the fittest climate was universal. Geologists have attributed the extinction of most of the species and the dwindling of others to the cold of the Reindeer epoch. It is the only explanation yet found, though seemingly insufficient for the Americas." (p. 1016.)
However, since the discovery of the pictures of the reindeer and the mammoth drawn and even painted side by side on the caverns of Southern France, undoubtedly from life and by the same artist, we do not hear so much about the "Reindeer epoch," and the "Mammoth epoch." A little thought should have suggested long ago that it was more reasonable to suppose the reindeer, glutton, musk-ox, etc., to have been originally adapted to the high mountains and table lands of that ancient world, than to imagine all the fauna careering up and down over continents and across seas like a lot of crazy Scandinavian lemmings, as the migration theory involved. But most geologists seem never to have had any use for mountains or plateaus, except to breed glaciers and continental ice-sheets. But the only point which I wish to insist upon here is that the cause, whatever it was, that made such a zoological break at the "close" of the Pleistocene, and which compelled the shivering, degenerate survivors, that could not stand the new extremes of frost and snow, to shift to the Tropics—this cause was certainly competent to do a good deal more work in the way of "extinction" or "dwindling" of species than the uniformitarians have generally given it credit for.
And in summing up this matter regarding the size and physical development of species, we must confess that we find in geology no indication of inherent progress upward. Variation there is and variation there has been, even "mutations" and "saltations," but with one voice do the rocks testify that the general results of such variation have not been upward. Rather must we confess as a great biological law, that degeneration has marked the history of every living form.
[CHAPTER XII]
FOSSIL MEN
There is still another fact which we must consider ere we can frame any wise or safe induction regarding the geological changes. It is this:
Man himself, to say nothing of numerous living animals and plants, must have witnessed something of the nature of a cosmic convulsion—how much it is the object of our search to find out. Even according to the ordinary text-books, he must have seen the uplifting of the greater part of the mountain chains of the world; while he certainly lived in conditions of climate, and of land and water distribution, together with plant and animal surroundings, which preclude the possibility of dovetailing those conditions into the present order of things on any basis of uniformity.