326 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 
Ratitw (HEA) which wander over its solitudes,! and the Jmpennes 
(PENGUIN), which haunt its shores and those of the Falkland 
Islands, besides the generalized Attagis, Chionis, and Thinocorys, the 
Cariamidx, Palamedeidx, Phytotomidx, Pteroptochidx, and other forms 
which are wholly or nearly peculiar, while some of the most char- 
acteristic ‘Neotropical Families, Cxrebidx, Mniotiltide, Tanagride, 
and Vireonidx, are but poorly represented or do not appear at all. 
The Antillean being the only Subregion whose precise boundaries 
can be definitely laid down, its Fauna, small as it is, is very in- 
teresting. The unbroken chain of islands, to which in common 
speech the name.‘ West Indies” is wrongly limited, forms geo- 
graphically a second connecting line between the two halves of the 
American continent, and at once suggests a former communication 
by land with Yucatan at one end and Venezuela at the other, to 
say nothing of a possible junction with Florida. Yet omitting 
other considerations,” the peculiar forms of Bird-life manifested 
throughout the chain shew that any such communication, if it ever 
existed, must have been exceedingly remote in point of time; for 
narrow as are the channels between Cuba and Central America, 
between the Bahamas and the south-western peninsula of North 
America, and between Grenada and Tobago (the latter, as already 
stated, belonging zoologically to South America) the Fauna of the 
Antilles, instead of being a mixture of that of the almost con- 
tiguous countries, differs much from all, and in some groups 
exhibits a speciality which may be not unfitly compared with that 
of Oceanic Islands. One might have expected here to find an 
extremely varied animal population ; but no instance perhaps can 
be cited to show more strikingly the difference between a con- 
tinental and an insular Fauna ; since, making every allowance for 
extinction since Europeans settled on the soil, possibly no area of 
land so highly favoured by nature is so poorly furnished with the 
higher forms of animal life, and here once more we have Birds 
constituting the supreme Class—the scarcity of Mammals being 
the normal effect of insularity. There is no Family of Birds 
common to the Nearctic area and the Antillean Subregion without 
occurring also in other parts of the Neotropical Region, a fact 
which proves its affinity to the latter. Out of about 140 genera 
found in the Subregion about 30 are peculiar to it, and these are all 
Land-birds, being a ratio very nearly approaching that found in 
Madagascar, but in no other subregional district; and the dis- 
tribution of some of the peculiar genera is very limited, for 19 out 
of the 30 are confined each to a single island or nearly connected 
1 Rhea macrorhyncha, however, occupies an isolated station much further to 
the north, in the province of Parahyba (Zbis, 1881, p. 361). 
* For these see ‘‘'lhree Cruises of the ‘ Blake,’” by Alexander Agassiz, Budd. 
Mus. Comp. Zool. Harvard Coll. xiv. xv. (Cambridge [Mass.]: 1888). 
