Imanuel Velokovsky - Earth in Upheaval - (page 25)
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/earth-upheaval.pdf
Darwin in South America
Charles Darwin, who had previously dropped his medical studies at Edinburgh University, upon his graduation in theology from Christ College, Cambridge, went in December 1831 as a naturalist on the ship Beagle, which sailed around the world on a five-year surveying expedition. Darwin had with him the newly published volume of Lyel's Principles of Geology that became his bible. On this voyage he wrote his Journal, the second edition of which he dedicated to Lyell. This round-the-world voyage was Darwin's only field-work experience in geology and palaeontology, and he drew on it all his life long. He wrote later that these observations served as the "origin of all my views." His observations were made in the Southern Hemisphere and more particularly in South America, a continent that had attracted the attention of naturalists since the exploration travels of Alexander von Humboldt (1799—1804). Darwin was impressed by the numerous assemblages of fossils of extinct animals, mostly of much greater size than species now living; these fossils spoke of a flourishing fauna that suddenly came to its end in a recent geological age. He wrote under January 9, 1834, in the Journal of his voyage: "It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pygmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races." He proceeded thus: "The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds lived at a late period, and were the contemporaries of most of the existing sea-shells. Since they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America up to Behring's [Bering's] Straits we must
shake the entire framework of the globe"