206 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
Mexico. The land molluscs of the islands to the south, on 
the contrary, from Barbuda and St. Kitt’s down to Trinidad, 
are of two types, one Venezuelan, the other Guianian; the 
western side of the supposed continuous land, namely, 
Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent, 
and St. Lucia, belonging to the first type; the eastern side, 
from Barbados to Antigua, to the second. 
Commenting on Mr. Bland’s valuable communication, 
Mr. Kingsley justly says: “If this be so, a glance at the 
map will show the vast destruction of tropic land during 
almost the very latest geological epoch; and show, too, how 
little, in the present imperfect state of our knowledge, we 
ought to dare any speculations as to the absence of man, as 
well as of other creatures, on those great lands destroyed. 
For, to supply the dry land which Mr. Bland’s theory needs, 
we shall have to conceive a junction, reaching over at least 
five degrees of latitude, between the north of British Guiana 
and Barbados; and may freely indulge in the dream that the 
waters of the Orinoco, when they ran over the lowlands of 
Trinidad, passed east of Tobago, then northward between 
Barbados and St. Lucia, afterwards turning westward 
between the latter island and Martinique, and that the 
mighty estuary—for a great part at least of that line—formed 
the original barrier which kept the land shells of Venezuela 
apart from those of Guiana.” * 
A very similar theory has been propounded by Mr. Wallace 
to account for the distribution of the faunas of the Malay 
Archipelago, in his admirable work on the natural history of 
that region.? Java, Sumatra, and Borneo are separated 
from each other, and from the continent of Asia, by a shallow 
sea less than six hundred feet in depth, and must at one time 
have been connected by continuous land to allow of the 
elephant and tapir of Sumatra and Borneo, the rhinoceros of 
Sumatra and Java, and the wild cattle of Borneo and Java, 
to spread from the continent to these now sea-surrounded 
lands, as none of these large animals could have passed over 
the arms of the sea that now separate them. The smaller 
mammals, the birds, and insects, all illustrate this view, 
almost all the genera found in any of the islands occurring 
1 Quoted in Az Last, by Charles Kingsley, p. 305. 
2 Loc. cit., p. 306: 3 The Malay Archipelago, vol. i. p. II. 
