ZOOGEOGRAPHY. 



WHEN you look in your geographies and see the continents 

 all marked out into countries and states, you forget that any* 

 thing except men inhabits those lands. How would you like 

 to see a bird geography of those regions ? Or what would you 

 say to an animal or a plant geography, showing where each 

 kind of animal and plant was to be found ? There are such 

 maps, and if you were to see a book full of them, with all sorts 

 of plants and insects and birds and mammals claiming the 

 country you' are living in, you would feel as if you had been 

 crowded out yourself. Yet as a matter of fact we all live on 

 the same territory very comfortably. Did you ever have a 

 dish full of apples and then fill the spaces between the 

 apples with hazel nuts, and shake rice kernels down the 

 crevices between the nuts and the apples, and grains of 

 sugar through the whole ? There were as many apples in 

 the dish as if there had been no nuts, rice, or sugar, were 

 there not ? These smaller articles merely filled in the waste 

 room. So it is with the animals on the globe. Innumerable 

 creatures may live on the same ground if they do not get in each 

 other's way, and each one can and does have a geography all 

 its own without interfering with the states and territories laid 

 out by men. The geography of any kind of plant or animal is 

 called its distribution, and it tells us where that species lives. 



If we had the maps of the distribution of all kinds of plants 

 and animals, each with its own home marked in a bright color, 

 and all the rest of the map blank, we should be surprised to 

 see that the maps could be sorted out into a few patterns so 



155 



