ANTAECTICA: A VAKISHED AUSTEAL LAND.i 



By Henry O. Forbes. 



The student of the general fauna aiul flora of the different countries 

 of the workl soon finds himself faced by this remarkable fact, that the 

 same species of a genus or the same genera of a family often occur at 

 spots on the earth's surface separated by enormous distances, in the 

 interval between which there is to be found not a single specimen of 

 any of them. Before the Darwinian era we were taught that those 

 similar isolated forms originated where they are now found by the fiat 

 and at the incomj)rehensible will of the Creator; an explanation, how- 

 ever unsatisfying, which there w^as no going behind. The purf)ose and 

 design in this distribution nuiy have appeared strangely erratic and 

 arbitrary, yet our longing to " know why" had to be stifled before this 

 ultimate fact that the power that willed it so was inscrutable; nor 

 dared one to question further without incurring the charge of sacrile- 

 giously prying into the unknowable. The light from laborious embry- 

 ological investigation, however, revealed no fact more clearly than this, 

 that the individuals of the same family, however far separated on the 

 globe, had arisen from the same progenitors by ordinary generation, 

 and that the cause of this random distribution of the same forms of life 

 iu distant regions might, without impiety, be investigated, and with 

 some hope of success. Having once, therefore, all had a common 

 ancestry, how did they reach their present habitats, which are half the 

 circumference of tbe globe apart, and separated by wide and deep 

 oceans, impassable to them unless they flew, swam, sailed over on floats, 

 or marched across by bridges that have disappeared between their 

 present and their former homes? For instance, the members of that 

 curious family of animals with something of the horse and the elephant 

 in their composition, the tapirs, are now found only in the southern 

 parts of South America on the one side of tbe globe, and in the center 

 of the islands of Sumatra and Borneo of the Malay Archipelago on the 

 other, and nowhere else. Their bizarre appearance and their close sim- 



'Frorn the Fortuightly Review, February, 1894, Vol. LV, new series. No. 126; by 

 permission of the Leonard Scott Publication Comjiany, New York. 



297 



