354 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 
The three chief Mascarene Islands have had their original Fauna 
so largely destroyed by colonization (see EXTERMINATION) that its 
peculiarities can hardly yet be accurately judged, and that chiefly 
from remains which, if not strictly fossil, have been recovered from 
the earth. Mauritius and Réunion, better known by its older name 
Bourbon, lying within sight of each other, and possessing about the 
same number of existing species, seem to have not more than three 
Land-birds in common, and there is one genus, OXYNOTUS, peculiar 
to these two islands and represented in each by a distinct species. 
Réunion had also, within the memory of men yet living, two peculiar 
genera, a Parrot, Mascarinus, and Fregilupus, perhaps allied to Falculia 
of Madagascar, and still more nearly to. Necropsar of Rodriguez. 
The Avifauna of this last and remote island has been so reduced 
that it has left only 3 species of native Land-birds; these are 
all peculiar, one being the Parrakeet, Palxornis exsul before men- 
tioned (p. 218) as being on the verge of extinction, and another an 
aberrant form of Dryme«ca, pointing possibly to a common origin 
with Indian species. The Land-birds of Seychelles which have not 
been introduced are 16 in number, and of these 14, according to 
Sir Edward Newton,! are peculiar, but there is perhaps not one 
good genus that may be so termed. ‘Taken as a whole, we cannot 
but be struck with the force of the evidence as to the land-connexion 
which seems to have once existed—though not necessarily all at 
once—between the various units forming the whole Subregion. 
Even the scanty remnant that is left shews how the denizens of 
its most distant parts represent one another, a clear token of 
their long-continued isolation and the working of a differentiating 
force. 
But before leaving this area reference must be made to an 
hypothesis which has obtained considerable support in various 
quarters, and has been accepted as an easy solution of a difficult 
problem. By dwelling on the peculiarities of the Fauna of Mada- 
gascar, regarding it as perfectly distinct from that of Africa, and 
looking to the fact that in that island are collected in great abund- 
ance the chief forms of those Mammals known as Lemurs, belonging 
to the Suborder Prosimix, while another group of the same Sub- 
order occupies the Indo-Malay Islands, the idea was conceived of 
there having once been not only a land-connexion between those 
countries, but that they must be the relics of a vast continent now 
submerged, to which the name of “ Lemuria” was assigned, and 
it has been counted as one of the primary Regions of the earth’s 
surface. The fallacy of the argument on behalf of this conjecture 
has been exposed by Mr. Wallace, who has not only shewn that 
the hypothesis of a Lemurian continent was alike unnecessary to 
1 “Vist of the Birds of the Mascarene Islands, including the Seychelles,” 
Trans. Norf. and Norw. Nat. Soc. iv. pp. 548-554. 
