Many of these
facts are quite different from what would have been anticipated,
and have hitherto been considered as highly curious but quite
inexplicable. None of the explanations attempted from the time of
Linnaeus are now considered at all satisfactory; none of them have
given a cause sufficient to account for the facts known at the
time, or comprehensive enough to include all the new facts which
have since been and are daily being added. Of late years, however,
a great light has been thrown upon the subject by geological
investigations, which have shown that the present state of the
earth, and the organisms now inhabiting it, are but the last stage
of a long and uninterrupted series of changes which it has
undergone, and consequently, that to endeavour to explain and
account for its present condition without any reference to those
changes (as has frequently been done) must lead to very imperfect
and erroneous conclusions.... The following propositions in
Organic Geography and Geology give the main facts on which the
hypothesis [_see_ p.
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