Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Clayey Gypsum,
Mixed With Calcareous Breccia With Madrepores, Cardites And Oysters,
Which I Found Between Carthagena And The Cerro
De la Popa, and the
equally recent limestones of Guadalope and Barbadoes (limestones
filled with seashells resembling those now existing
In the Caribbean
Sea) prove that the latest deposited strata of the tertiary formation
extend far towards the west and north.
These recent formations, so rich in vestiges of organized bodies,
furnish a vast field of observation to those who are familiar with the
zoological character of rocks. To examine these vestiges in strata
superposed as by steps, one above another, is to study the Fauna of
different ages and to compare them together. The geography of animals
marks out limits in space, according to the diversity of climates,
which determine the actual state of vegetation on our planet. The
geology of organized bodies, on the contrary, is a fragment of the
history of nature, taking the word history in its proper acceptation:
it describes the inhabitants of the earth according to succession of
time. We may study genera and species in museums, but the Fauna of
different ages, the predominance of certain shells, the numerical
relations which characterize the animal kingdom and the vegetation of
a place or of a period, should be studied in sight of those
formations. It has long appeared to me that in the tropics as well as
in the temperate zone the species of univalve shells are much more
numerous than bivalves. From this superiority in number the organic
fossil world furnishes, in every latitude, a further analogy with the
intertropical shells that now live at the bottom of the ocean.
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