252 ZOOLOGICAL GEOGRAPHY. [PART III. 
different kind of country ; being almost wholly dense forests 
where not cleared by man, and having the hot moist uniform 
climate, and perennial luxuriance of vegetation, which charac- 
terise the great equatorial belt of forest all round the globe. This 
forest country extends to an unknown distance inland, but it was 
found, with its features well marked, by Dr. Schweinfurth directly 
he crossed the south-western watershed of the Nile; and far to 
the south we find it again unmistakably indicated, in the exces- 
sively moist forest country about the head waters of the Congo, 
where’the heroic Livingstone met his death. In this forest 
district many of the more remarkable African types are alone 
found, and its productions occasionally present us with curious 
similarities to those of the far removed South American or 
Malayan forests. This is our second or West African sub- 
* region. 
Extra-tropical South Africa possesses features of its own, quite 
distinct from those of both the preceding regions (although it has 
also much in common with the first). Its vegetation is known 
to be one of the richest, most peculiar, and most remarkable on 
the globe ; and in its zoology it has a speciality, similar in kind 
but less in degree, which renders it both natural and convenient 
to separate it as our third, or South African sub-region. Its 
limits are not very clearly ascertained, but it is probably bounded 
by the Kalahari desert on the north-west, and by the Limpopo” 
Valley, or the mountain range beyond, on the north-east, although 
some of its peculiar forms extend to Mozambique. There 
remains the great Island of Madagascar, one of the most isolated 
and most interesting on the globe, as regards its animal produc- 
tions ; and to this must be added, the smaller islands of Bourbon, 
Mauritius and Rodriguez, the Seychelles and the Comoro Islands, 
forming together the Mascarene Islands,—the whole constituting 
our fourth sub-region. 
Zoological Characteristics of the Ethiopian Region—We have 
now to consider briefly, what are the peculiarities and charac- 
teristics of the Ethiopian Region as a whole,—those which give 
it its distinctive features and broadly separate it from the other 
primary zoological regions. 
