140 Thomas Henry Huxley 



except north of the Sahara, and Madagascar ; the Aus- 

 tralian, containing Austraha and New Zealand and 

 some of the more southeastern of the islands of Mala}'- ; 

 the Neotropical, including South America. Huxle}^ 

 first called attention to certain noteworth}^ resemblances 

 between the Neotropical and the Australian regions of 

 Sclater, and held that a primary division of the world 

 was into Ardogcea, comprising the great land masses 

 of the Northern Hemisphere with a part of their exten- 

 sion across the equator, and Notogaui, which contained 

 Australia but not New Zealand and South America. 

 Although this acute suggestion has not been generally 

 accepted as a modification of Mr. Sclater' s scheme, it 

 called attention in a striking fashion to some very re- 

 markable features in the distribution of animals. Sub- 

 sequent writers have considerably extended Huxle3''s 

 conception of the similarities to be found among the 

 more southern land areas. Thej- have pointed out that 

 the most striking idea of the distribution of land and 

 water on the surface of the globe is to be got by con- 

 sidering the globe alternately from one pole and from 

 the other. In the south, a clump of ice-bound land, 

 well within the Antarctic Circle, surrounds the pole. 

 All else is a wide domain of ocean broken only where 

 tapering and isolated tongues of land, South America, 

 the Cape, Australia, lean down from the great land 

 masses of the north. On the other hand, all the great 

 land masses expand in the Northern Hemisphere, and 

 shoulder one another round the North Pole. America 

 is separated from Asia only by the shallowest and nar- 

 rowest of straits ; an elevation of a few fathoms would 

 unite Greenland with Europe. Science points definitel}^ 

 to some part of the great northern land area as the 

 centre of life for at least the larger terrestrial forms of 



