ZOOLOGY. 255 



of Its advance in recent times, in the absorption into its circle of the 

 facts of past biological history, to Prof. Owen, whose " Palaeontology" 

 is a sort of panorama of extinct forms, placed side by side with their 

 existing congeners and representatives. Australia and New Zealand 

 have not only furnished innumerable subjects of anomalous kinds for 

 the consideration of system-makers, but they have opened the way for 

 rays of light to fall on the present direct from the past, by their illus- 

 trations of geological eras. Nothing more strikingly exemplifies the 

 relationship that subsists between all departments of knowledge, than 

 the aid which zoology and geology respectively offer to each other. The 

 existing fauna of Ceylon, as analyzed by Sir Emerson Tenneut, affords 

 very satisfactory indications that the island is, in no geological or zoo- 

 logical sense, an outlier of the vast Indian continent, but a site sui gen- 

 eris like Australia, detached not only in its geography from the neigh- 

 boring continent, but in its chronology also, and in all its organic pro- 

 ductions. On the other hand, geology does more than whisper of the 

 connection that once subsisted bejtwecn England and the Continent of 

 Europe by way of the straits of Dover; for it furnishes all the evidence 

 requisite to establish the conclusion that the separation was effected 

 not very long antecedent to the commencement of the historic era. 

 Zoology does not touch the chronology of the question, but it affixes 

 the general conclusion ; and we begin to discover that, however valu- 

 able are the floras and faunas of Britain, they tell but half their proper 

 story unless considered in connection with the floras and faunas of the 

 Continent. Intellectual Observer. 



ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE CHAEACTERISTICS OF ASIA 



AJSD AUSTRALIA. 



Mr. Wallace, the well-known English naturalist, in a recent paper 

 before the British Geographical Society stated that while Asia and 

 Australia were more widely distinct in their animal and vegetable pro- 

 ductions than any two portions of the earth, it could be shown that 

 these peculiarities extended on each side into the adjacent islands, so 

 that when you came to the little islands of Baly and Lombock, sepa- 

 rated only by a strait 15 miles wide, you have the production of two 

 continents brought into close contact without intermingling; the birds, 

 for example, being almost totally different in the two islands, and not 

 the species merely, but even the genera and families of the one not 

 extending into the other. 



NEW CLASSIFICATION OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 



At a recent meeting of the French Academy, M. Chevreul explained 

 a plan devised by him for a new classification of the animal kingdom. 

 His principle may be briefly stated as follows : Under the present 

 system, in which the physical organization of the animal is taken for a 

 guide, it often happens that its intellectual development is at variance 

 with its physiological state. Thus, the quadrumana precede the car- 

 nivora in the present system, the organization of the former being su- 

 perior to that of the latter. Now, if we take the ourang outang, chinf- 

 panzee, and gorilla, as types of the quadrumana, both their organiza- 

 tion and intellectual faculties will induce us to place them immediately 

 after man. ^Bui the makis, which are also quadrumanous, and there- 



