366 



NA TURE 



{Feb. 14, 1889 



Japan and Europe live in insular climates, while those of Siberia 

 occupy an area with a continental climate. I do not think many 

 biologists can accept this explanation. England and Japan are 

 3700 miles apart. That a single bird whose normal type is found 

 in Siberia should vary from that type in two areas thus remote 

 from one another in precisely the 'same way is perhaps possible. 

 That a whole string of birds (and I only nvntioned a sample) 

 should dj the same is it seems to me, when tested by the 

 doctrine of chances and the infinite variability of bird structure 

 and colour, an impossibility. 



Apart from this a priori argument, we have the fact— which 

 is, of course, known to Prof. Newton— that Blakiston's line 

 separating Vesso and the southern island of Japan also separ.ites 

 two avifaunas, and that the species on each side of the narrow 

 strait of Yesso are in many cases different, although they live in 

 insular areas close to one another, and subject to virtually the 

 same insular climate, while those of England and Japan, whose 

 climate is not i-o like, areundistinguishable. I cannot, therefore, 

 for a moment accept Prof. Newton's theory as in any way 

 meeting the facts which are admirably met at every point by 

 the theory which I have propounded, and which is not based 

 on the variation of the birds alone, but upon a whole catena of 

 converging evidence from many sides, the evidence of the birds 

 being only a subsidiary support. 



I am sorry that I had overlooked Prof. Newton's article in the 

 " Encyclopxdia," and am glad that my suggestion about the 

 red grouse, which I can assure him was quite independently 

 made, had already occurred to and been countenanced by so 

 distinguished an ornithologist, against whom I hear continual 

 complaints, which ought to be very flattering, that he writes' too 

 little. 



Reverting to the main issue, it is a great pleasure to me to 

 have Prof. James Geikie's permission to publish an extract from 

 a letter which he has sent to me, in which he is compktely at 

 one with me in the conclusion that, when the mammoth lived, 

 the climate of Siberia was temperate, and that it lived where its 

 remains are found. This is particularly gratifying to me, not 

 only because Prof. J. Geikie is the most learned and voluminous 

 writer upon the so-called Pleistocene age, his stout volumes 

 being marked as much by their extraordinary profusion of refer- 

 ence's and of facts as by their lucid arrangement, but because 

 upon some of the main conclusions I have arrived at he takes a 

 very different view. Prof. J. Geikie says ; — 



"I do not need to be converted to the view that Siberia 

 formerly enjoyed a tem;:era'e climate. If you will consult the 

 first edition of my ' Great Ice Age' (p. 494), you will. see that 

 my belief for the last fifteen years has been that the mammalian 

 remains of North Siberia are the relics of a fauna that lived and 

 died '\\\ those now dreary regions. Indeed, I had that notion 

 when I first began to read what had been written upon the sub- 

 ject some five-and-twenty years ago ! I was willing, however, 

 to admit the possibility of some of the remains having been 

 drifted north by rivers. But it has always seemed to me incon- 

 ceivable that this diifiing would account for the presence of such 

 great ossiferous accumula'.ions as travellers have described. I 

 likewise long ago discarded the notion of ^easonal migrations, 

 such as Dawkins and others have maintained (see Geoi. Mag., 

 1872, p. 164 ; 1873, p. ^9)." 



1 shall not labour the argument further, nor shall I enlarge 

 upon what I deem to be an inevitable corollary from it — viz. 

 that if the climate of Siberia was tempera!e w'.ien the mammoth 

 lived, and if it lived where its remains occur, on the now bare 

 and almost perpetually frozen htndra, it follows that its extinc- 

 tion there must have been followed by a most rapid, if not a 

 sudden, change of climate. The existence of its undecay,d 

 carcasses in all parts of Siberia, from the Obi to the Indigirka, is 

 consistent only with this conclusion. If the change of climate 

 had been gradual, the flesh of the great beasts could not have 

 been preserved intact, but would have putrefied and decayed. 

 This was long ago seen and emphasized by Cuvier, and even 

 Lyell was constrained to write :—" It is certain that, from the 

 moment when the carcasses both of the rhinoceros and the ele- 

 phant above described were buried in Siberia, in lat. 64° and 

 70° N., the soil has remained frozen, and the atmosphere as co'd 

 as at this day." Again, he says : — " One thing is clear, that the 

 ice or congealed mud in which the bodies of such quadrupeds 

 were enveloped has never once been melted since the day when 

 they perished, so as to allow the percolation of water through 

 the matrix, for, had this been the case, the soft parts of the 

 animals could not have remained undecomposed." It was to 

 avoid the necessarily awkward inference from this conclusion, 



for one who preached uniformity so continuously, that Lyell 

 v/as forced to invoke his theory of river portage, v^fhich is rib 

 longer tenable, and, so far as I know, is no longer held by any 

 serious student. Hexry H. IIoworth. 



Bentcliffe, Eccles, February 3. 



Peripattts in Victoria. 

 It may interest some of the readers of your journal te know 

 that last week, while collecting in a fern-tree gully at AVarburtori, 

 on the Upper Yarra, Victoria, I had the good fortune to dis- 

 cover two specimens oi Pcripatus, belonging, as I think, to a new 

 and certainly to a very beautiful species. 



I hope to publish a full description, with figures, of the species 

 as soon as possible, but I am now preparing for a visit to 

 Tasmania, and some time must necessarily elapse before I can 

 complete the work. I should therefore be greatly obliged if you 

 could find space for this letter in Nature. 



In his " iVIonograph on the Species and Distribution of the 

 Genus Pcripatus," recently published in the Quarterly Journal 

 of Microscopical Science, Prof. Sedgwick makes no mention of 

 the occurrence of the genus in Victoria ; though he describes in 

 detail the Queensland and New Zealand species. In a note in 

 the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 

 (vol. ii. Part i, 1887), however, Mr. Fletcher has recorded the 

 discovery of the genus in Victoria. He says, "The specimen 

 which I exhibit this evening was given to me a fortnight ago by 

 my friend Mr. R. T. Baker, of Newington College, who had 

 obtained it a fe>v days previously either in or under a rotten log 

 at Warragul, Gippsland, Victoria. It has fifteen pairs of claw- 

 bearing appendages, and has nearly the same dimensions as are 

 given in the abstract referred to ; it is therefore in all probability 

 an example of /". Icuckartii, Sanger." 



From Mr. Fletcher's account I am not able to say definitely 

 whether the specimens obtained by me belong to the same 

 species as the single specimen which he mentions ; but after care- 

 fully studying Prof. Sedgwick's full description of P. leuckartii, 

 I am fairly certain that they do not belong to that species, but 

 to a new one which I for the present refrain from naming. 



Both of my specimens were captured under fallen logs, where 

 they were lying quite still. The first appeared to be dead soon 

 after it was caught, and was therefore placed at once in alcohol. 

 The second was found under a damp, rotten log, probably of 

 FAica'yptus, in the same gully. It was taken home alive and 

 put to crawl about on a newspaper, when it appeared very 

 active. It elongated considerably when crawling, so that the 

 legs came to be much further apart than when the animal was at, 

 rest, and when crawling it measured about 39 millimetres in 

 length, excluding the antenna;. When irritated at the head end 

 it ejected a surprisingly large quantity of an intensely sticky 

 fluid, of a whitish colour, from the oral papillae. 



Tbe species has, as in the two already described Australasian 

 forms, fifteen pairs of claw-bearing leg-, but it differs very 

 strikingly indeed both from P. l.uckartii and from P. nov<z- 

 z-alandicB in the colour and markings of the body. The general 

 tint is brownish red, with only traces in one specimen of the 

 bluish colour so characteristic of the two above-mentioned 

 species. The markings on the body are singularly distinct and 

 well defined, and identical in the two specioiens. All down the 

 dorsal surface there runs a median broad reddish-brown or 

 chestnut-coloured band, divided into a series of diamond-shaped 

 patches by regular lateral indentations, one diamond correspond- 

 ing to each pair of legs. In ihe middle of this band there is a 

 thin, median, whitish line. On either side the chestnut-coloured 

 band is edged by a narrow black line, which fallows the inden- 

 tations of its margin, and outside this comes a broad band of 

 darker brown, and then, at the edge of the dorsal surface, a 

 narrow band of light brown. The ventral surface is light ,, 

 yellowish-brown, speckled with spots of very dark pigment, # i 

 especially abundant at the base of each leg. In the mid-ventral I i 

 line there is a row of white spots, one between the two legs of 

 each pair except the first (?) and the last (where, of course, the 

 genital opening is situated). The antenna are light brown, 

 closely ringed all the way up with very dark brown or black. 



This species, though small, is to my mind even more beautiful 

 than any of those figured by Prof Sedgwick, and I think there 

 can be little doubt as to its distinctness. The anatomical 

 features I hope to describe at a later date, and perhaps they will 

 t'lrow further light upon its relations to previously described 

 forms. Arthur Dendy. 



University of Melbourne, pecem':er 18, 18S8. 



