The geographical and geological distribution of animals / Angelo Heilprin.

  • Heilprin, Angelo, 1853-1907.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The geographical and geological distribution of animals / Angelo Heilprin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    On the other hand, a journey of only very moderate duration will frequently disclose the greatest diversity existing between con- tiguous faunas. The traveller who starts east from the African coast, and who has familiarised himself with the strange produc- tions of the African continent, its elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, lions, and antelopes, finds none of these in the island of Madagascar ; the true monkeys have also disappeared, and in their place he meets with forms of half-monkeys (lemurs), a group of animals with which he will have already become acquainted before leaving the mainland. Strange creatures, wholly unlike anything previously known to him, now arrest his attention, and he finds himself in the midst of what might be termed a peculiar fauna. Likewise, if he leave the shores of Central America or Florida for the Great Antilles, the same marked isolation of the new fauna manifests itself. The larger forms of quadrupeds, such as the jaguar, couguar, tapir, and peccary, are wholly wanting, and even among the smaller and more numerously represented mammalian types many of the more prominent forms will be sought for in vain. On the other hand, he will make the acquaintance of entirely new groups of animals, some of which, like the Centetidse, have their nearest foreign representatives in regions removed by nearly one-half the circumference of the globe. And this diversity in the faunal type is found to permeate to a greater or less extent all the individual groups, birds, reptiles, &c., of the animal king- dom. It might be rashly supposed that the distance separating the regions under comparison would sufficiently account for the pecu- liarities of their respective faunas, or the disparities separating them; but distance alone, without a special relation binding to- gether the principals between which it is supposed to act, can effect nothing. We have, indeed, seen upon what a vast extent of territory the British faunal facies is stamped, and were any further proof needed of the inefficacy of distance, pure and simple, as a prime factor in geographical distribution, we have but to transport ourselves to the Malay Archipelago, and observe how wonderfully diverse arc the respective faunas on either side of the very narrow (but deep) channel separating the islands of Bali and Lombok from each other. Mysterious as these various phenomena of distribution may ap-