ll as
AEpyornis, which is only recently extinct, are found in the same regions.
But we have no palaeontological evidence in favour of these extravagant
views. Fossil Edentates and Marsupials are almost entirely confined to
the Southern Hemisphere, and the supposition that because these
primitive mammals inhabit the extreme south of our great continental
land-masses, they therefore came from the north, cannot be said to be an
argument. Nevertheless, I am quite with Dr. Haacke in considering that
the North Pole, or, we might say, the lands within the Arctic Circle,
have been the place of origin of some of our European mammals, and there
can be no doubt that certain species in other groups, among
invertebrates and also plants, have originated in the Polar Regions.
The facts of geographical distribution teach us that in these regions
there has been a centre of origin within comparatively recent geological
times. I have on a previous occasion drawn attention to the range of the
Reindeer: that it lives almost throughout the Polar lands, and that it
spreads into North America, Northern Europe, and Northern Asia. We have,
again, fossil proof that its range extended down to the Pyrenees in
Europe in pleistocene times. But there is not a scrap of evidence that
it ever during any time occurred farther south, either in Europe, Asia,
or North America. Its original home must therefore have been in the
Polar Regions, for if it had originated either in Central Europe, Asia,
or America, there is no reason why it should not, in the natural course
of events, have extended its range to the south as well as to the north.

The Arctic Hare presents us with a very similar case of distribution.
Like the Reindeer, it inhabits, as we have learned, the Polar Regions
and the northerly parts of the Old World and the New; but while we have
only fossil evidence of the former, more southerly, extension of the
range of the Reindeer, the Arctic Hare furnishes us with a still
stronger proof of its past southward range in the survival of small
isolated colonies in some of the southern mountain ranges of Europe and
Asia. It is generally believed that the occurrence of the Arctic Hare in
these southern mountains is a standing testimony to the severity of the
climate at the time when it commenced its southerly increase of range,
but I have already shown that the climate of Europe at that time was not
necessarily colder than it is at present, but that it may ha