The Geographical Distribution of Animals: With a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth's Surface, 2. köide

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Macmillan and Company, 1876 - 503 pages

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Page 570 - OCEAN. The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life. Being the Second Series of a Descriptive History of the Life of the Globe.
Page 113 - ... to declare every snake met with to be the most venomous one in their country; and thus travellers often come away with exceedingly erroneous impressions on the subject. The Indian region surpasses every other part of the globe in the number and variety of its...
Page 135 - ... divided in the earliest Eocene, and even in Cretaceous times; while we have the strongest proof that South America was peopled from the Nearctic, and Australia and Africa from the Palaearctic region; hence, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres are the two great branches of the tree of life of our globe. But this division, taken by itself, would obscure the facts — firstly, of the close relation and parallelism of the Nearctic and...
Page 512 - The preceding remarks are all I now venture to offer, on the distinguishing features of the various groups of land-animals as regards their distribution and migrations. They are at best but indications of the various lines of research opened up to us by the study of animals from the geographical point of view, and by looking upon their range in space and time as an important portion of the earth's history. Much work has yet to be done before the materials will exist for a complete treatment of the...
Page 3 - Richness combined with isolation is the predominant feature of Neotropical zoology, and no other region can approach it in the number of its peculiar family and generic types. It has eight families of Mammalia absolutely confined to it, besides several others which are rare elsewhere. These consist of two families of monkeys, Cebidae and...
Page 338 - ... bringing about the extinction of many of the larger species of these wingless birds. The wide distribution of the Struthiones may, as we have already suggested (VoL I., p. 287.), be best explained, by supposing them to represent a very ancient type of bird, developed at a time when the more specialized carnivorous mammalia had not come into existence, and preserved only in those areas which were long free from the incursions of such dangerous enemies.
Page 189 - SLB-EKGIOKS. ia3.*| i regions or the Tropics. They range in fact over the whole of the great continents of the globe, with the one striking exception of Africa, where they are only found on the shores of the Mediterranean which form part of the Palsearctic region. The following is the distribution of the genera. Alces (1 species), the elk or moose, ranges all over Northern Europe and Asia, as far south as East Prussia, the Caucasus, and North China ; and over Arctic America to Maine on the East,...
Page 223 - Europe) during the Tertiary period, we must suppose that it was at a far more remote epoch that the ancestral forms of all the other marsupials entered Australia...
Page 503 - These singular and lowly-organised animals appear to have become almost restricted to the two great Southern lands — South Africa and South America — at an early period ; and, being there free from the competition of higher forms, developed a number of remarkable types often of huge size, of which the Megatherium is one of the best known. The incursion of the highly-organised Ungulates and Carnivora into Africa during the Miocene epoch, probably exterminated most of them in that continent ; but...
Page 512 - ... distribution has to contend against, is the total absence of geographical collections, and the almost total want of complete and comparable local catalogues. Till every wellmarked district, — every archipelago, and every important island, has all its known species of the more important groups of animals catalogued on a uniform plan, and with a uniform nomenclature, a thoroughly satisfactory account of the Geographical Distribution of Animals will not be possible.

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