Mr. A. Murray on Coleoptera from Old Calabar. 433 



itself, but we are not troubled with any aberrant forms of its 

 own t^-jje. 



Laeordaire records thirty-five species of Paranfi?/-a : of these, 

 twenty-eight are American (viz. seven from North America, 

 one from Mexico, three from the West Indies, thirteen from 

 tlie Culumbian district, including New Granada, Columbia, 

 Venezuela, and Cayenne, and three from Brazil), four from 

 Africa (viz. one from Old Calabar, one from Gaboon, and two 

 from the Cape), one from the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea, 

 and two from New Caledonia. We have here, as I read the 

 distribution, four, if not five, main localities, Avhich either are 

 now or have been at some former period separated from each 

 other by important gaps ; and the question presents itself in 

 as unmixed a form as can well be, Are Ave to suj)pose that the 

 lands separated by these gaps were at some former period 

 united, or is the wide distribution of Parandra due to acci- 

 dental dispersal or ancient general distribution ? 



It seems to me that its preponderance in one coimtry and 

 extreme rarity elsewhere are adverse to the idea of its having 

 originally been universally distributed. Where that explana- 

 tion applies, as, for instance, in the ferns, both fossil remains 

 and present distribution show the same typical forms in abun- 

 dance in every quarter of the globe. But if we do not give it 

 a general or universal distribution, we must fix on some one 

 or more localities as its aboriginal site or centre of creation 

 (using that term in a wide and liberal sense, and not con- 

 founding with it the question of single or multiple original 

 creations) ; and where we have twenty-eight species in one 

 region as against seven in all the rest, there seem grounds 

 for holding that America was its aboriginal land, and 

 New Granada or its neighbourhood the centre or starting- 

 point of its distribution. Thence there is no difficulty in 

 assuming that it has spread, on the one hand, into North 

 America, and, on the other, into Brazil. It will not be so 

 readily admitted, but I believe it to be equally true, that it 

 has reached West Africa from the Brazilian coast by former 

 and very ancient continuity of land, in the same Avay that the 

 other South-American types which we have found in Old 

 Calabar have done, and thence in later times spread into 

 the other parts of Africa ; and by the same line that the Caf- 

 frarian Adesmias have made their way into Mongolia, this 

 genus also has spread to the Caspian Sea. From the other 

 (the western) side of South America it may have in like man- 

 ner spread, by former more or less interrupted continuity, to 

 New Caledonia, as the genus Photophorus has carried repre- 

 sentatives of the fireflies out of South America into these islands. 



