PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES. 803 



How shall we account for the fact that not one of the large West 

 Indian islands betrays a vestige of an effort in the same direction? 



More monkey-inviting forests than those of southern Hayti can 

 not be found in the tropics, but not even a marmoset or squirrel- 

 monkey accepted the invitation. In an infinite series of centuries 

 not one pair of quadrumana availed itself of the chance to cross a 

 sea gap, though at several points the mainland approaches western 

 Cuba within less than two hundred miles — about half the distance 

 that separates southern Asia from Borneo, where fourhanders of all 

 sizes and colors compete for the products of the wilderness, and, ac- 

 cording to Sir Philip Maitland, the " native women avoid the coast 

 jungles for fear of meeting Mr. Darwin's grandfather." 



The first Spanish explorers of the Antilles were, in fact, so amazed 

 at the apparently complete absence of quadrupeds that their only 

 explanation was a conjecture that the beasts of the forest must have 

 been exterminated by order of some native potentate, perhaps the 

 great Kubla Khan, whose possessions they supposed to extend east- 

 ward from Lake Aral to the Atlantic. The chronicle of Diego Co- 

 lumbus says positively that San Domingo and San Juan Bautista 

 (Porto Rico) were void of mammals, but afterward modifies that state- 

 ment by mentioning a species of rodent, the hutia, or bush rat, that 

 annoyed the colonists of Fort Isabel, and caused them to make an 

 appropriation for importing a cargo of cats. 



Bush rats and moles were, up to the end of the sixteenth century, 

 the only known indigenous quadrupeds of the entire West Indian 

 archipelago, for the " Carib dogs," which Valverde saw in Jamaica, 

 were believed to have been brought from the mainland by a horde of 

 man-hunting savages. 



But natural history has kept step with the advance of other sci- 

 ences, and the list of undoubtedly aboriginal mammals on the four 

 main islands of the Antilles is now known to comprise more than 

 twenty species. That at least fifteen of them escaped the attention 

 of the Spanish Creoles is as strange as the fact that the Castilian cattle 

 barons of Upper California did not suspect the existence of precious 

 metals, though nearly the whole bonanza region of the San Joaquin 

 Valley had been settled before the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury. But the conquerors of the Philippines even overlooked a 

 variety of elephants that roams the coast jungles of Mindanao. 



Eight species of those West Indian incognito mammals, it is true, 

 are creatures of a kind which the Spanish zoologists of Valverde's 

 time would probably have classed with birds — bats, namely, includ- 

 ing the curious Vespertilio molossus, or mastiff bat, and several 

 varieties of the owl-faced Chilonycteris, that takes wing in the gloom 

 preceding a thunderstorm, as well as in the morning and evening twi- 



