‘“ Poy ai i toe ap AP ae ee Oe ere 8 lias NE See he Ne 
PE Re CO eo ee ee ee 
My esi Lay og ON Vt ae ay EY ’ % 
We , ee, } : x - . 
exlili 
boar is frequent in some places, and in broken country, 
Herpestes, Hystrix and Genetia may occasionally be seen. The 
small mammals are not numerous in the Tell as regards species. 
The three shrews recorded are of European origin and are 
typical for the Tell; only one is common, the white-toothed 
garden shrew of Europe, which reaches in Eastern Algeria the 
foot of the Aurés Mountains, while farther west it does not 
appear to have penetrated on to the High Plateaux, the 
explanation of its southward extension in eastern Algeria being 
that the district of Khenchela, where we found this shrew, is 
connected by a brook with a river of the Tell, the Oued Melleg. 
The long-tailed field-mouse, slightly different from the English 
and European forms, we obtained as far south as El Kantara, 
while the house-mouse and its near relation Mus algirus 
extend far into the desert, Mus algirus being excessively 
common in the oases of the Oued Rhir from Biskra to Tougourt. 
We find in the Tell also a mouse of an Ethiopian genus, 
Arvicanthis barbarus, the Barbary or striped rat, which is 
restricted to the Tell, where it is fairly common in grassland 
and cornfields. Its nearest congeners are found in the Nile 
countries, and we may therefore conclude that this Arvicanthis 
reached Mauretania from the east along the coast. The 
suggestion made by some authors that it came across the 
Sahara at a period when the river-beds of the desert had a richer 
vegetation than in our time must be dismissed as highly 
improbable. In fact, all the Algerian mammals which have 
Ethiopian affinities came from the east, not from the south, and 
most of them, like the lion, leopard, hyaena and porcupine, 
inhabited Western Asia, the striped hyaena being a West 
Asiatic species which has extended into Hast Africa and 
Mauretania. The birds of the Tell are of an essentially 
Palaearctic character with an admixture of some indigenous 
species and two forms of Ethiopian origin. But these Ethio- 
pian birds, unlike the mammals, did not come from the Nile 
countries or Mediterranean Asia, but along the Atlantic coast 
and via Morocco. The Bulbul has its nearest relative in West 
Africa, and the Telephonus of Algeria and Morocco is a tropical 
African type. As a third example we will introduce here a 
bird which is not found in the Tell, but the distribution of which 
