[On the Genesis of Species by St. George Mivart]@TWC D-Link bookOn the Genesis of Species CHAPTER III 5/30
These, indeed, are strikingly similar, but there are better examples still of this sort of coincidence.
Thus it has often {69} been remarked that the insectivorous marsupials, _e.g.
Perameles_, wonderfully correspond, as to the form of certain of the grinding teeth, with certain insectivorous placentals, _e.g.
Urotrichus_. Again, the saltatory insectivores of Africa (_Macroscelides_) not only resemble the kangaroo family (_Macropodidae_) in their jumping habits and long hind legs, but also in the structure of their molar teeth, and even further, as I have elsewhere[52] pointed out, in a certain similarity of the upper cutting teeth, or incisors. Now these correspondences are the more striking when we bear in mind that a similar dentition is often put to very different uses.
The food of different kinds of apes is very different, yet how uniform is their dental structure! Again, who, looking at the teeth of different kinds of bears, would ever suspect that one kind was frugivorous, and another a devourer exclusively of animal food? The suggestion made by Professor Huxley was therefore one which had much to recommend it to Darwinians, though it has not met with any notable acceptance, and though he seems himself to have returned to the older notion, namely, that the pouched-beasts, or marsupials, are a special ancient offshoot from the great mammalian class. But whichever view may be the correct one, we have in either case a number of forms similarly modified in harmony with surrounding conditions, and eloquently proclaiming some natural plastic power, other than mere fortuitous variation with survival of the fittest.
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