ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 301 



car, and South America — that is, their distribution extended right 

 round, and was i^ractically confined to the lands of the Southern Hem- 

 isphere, in whicli the area that each occupies is seen from a study of 

 the map to be separated from the other by vast stretches of unbridged 

 ocean. Yet a comparison of their skeletons — for of the moa, the 

 ^Epyornis, and the Brontornis we have only their fossil bones to judge 

 from — leaves little doubt that they are all ramifications of one branch 

 of the same genealogical tree which flourished in a region which I hope 

 to indicate in the course of this i^aper, and that they wandered in 

 all directions from a common land by roads which I shall presently 

 attempt to trace. 



The traveler interested in bird life who has spent some time either in 

 South Africa, or in South Australia, or has had the good fortune to 

 land on the shores of Terra del Fuego, or of one of the Antarctic 

 islands, can scarcely have failed to watch those quaint fishlike birds, 

 the penguins, which are far more at home under the water than they 

 are on the land. They breed in enormous rookeries on some of the 

 more unfrequented southern islands, but they are met with in all parts 

 of the Southern Hemisphere south of 40 degrees of south latitude, 

 each island or continent having some species peculiar to itself. One 

 important point in their history is that none of the family have ever 

 been found on the northern side of the equator, a distribution which 

 has probably been always equally circumscribed within these latitudes, 

 for their earliest fossil remains — osteologically identical throughout the 

 enormous period separating the Eocene from to day — are known only 

 from, and are, so far as I am aware, confined to the older Tertiary 

 formations of New Zealand and Patagonia. More interesting still, 

 perhaps, and very important from the point of view of the subject of 

 this paper, is the distribution of the Chionidce, a family of beautiful, 

 pure white birds related to the plovers. These sheath bills, as they are 

 named, from a conspicuous horny sheath at the base of their bills, are 

 not marine but land birds. They would be incapable of undertaking a 

 journey of any great duration across the sea where they could find 

 nothing to support them; yet they are found, so far as known, in 

 Fuegia and the neighboring Falkland Islands, but not elsewhere till 

 the far-off Crozet Islands and Kerguelen Land are reached. 



The well-known and brilliantly plumaged family of the parrots have 

 their chief development in the Australian and Papuan regions and in 

 South America (with a few stragglers extending up into North Amer- 

 ica), while in South Africa and in India they are but feebly represented. 

 Now, the curious owl i^arrots and the keas of New Zealand have a 

 near relationship with the macaws of South America. Mr. Wallace 

 has pointed out that an unusual style of coloration occurs among the 

 parrots living both in Australia and the Mascarene Islands ; and that 

 though in Australia alone species adorned with crests now live, yet 

 within the historical period, such forms occurred in the Mascarene 



