72 ZOOLOGICAL REGIONS. [CH. II 



But there are greater differences between Great Britain 

 and Japan than between France and Great Britain. 



In fact the more remote the tracts of country are 

 from each other, the more diverse are their faunas. But 

 there is no accurate balancing of distance and diversity of 

 fauna possible ; a journey into Central Africa, shorter by 

 hundreds of miles than that to Japan, will bring the 

 traveller into contact with forms of life altogether 

 different from those which occur in these islands. The 

 elephant, the giraffe, and the anthropoid apes will testify 

 to the change which has taken place in a journey com- 

 paratively so short. In the Eastern Archipelago are two 

 islands only separated by a few miles, Bali and Lombok ; 

 traversing this narrow strait will produce an entire change 

 in the fauna, greater even than that which is experienced 

 by the traveller from Europe to Tropical Africa. An 

 entirely new race of mammals will be met with, the 

 marsupials ; while the apes, carnivora, and ungulate 

 animals of the western parts of the Indian Archipelago 

 entirely vanish or get exceedingly rare. 



Mr Sclater's regions. 



The first real attempt to divide the earth into regions 

 corresponding with the range of its inhabitants is that of 

 Mr Sclater 1 . 



His results were obtained entirely from a consideration 

 of the Passerine and some of the Picarian birds. Never- 

 theless the regions thus formed were found applicable to 



1 Journ. Linn. Soc., 1857. 



