DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. 



571 



which furnish him with the staff of life, demand cultivation in order to be prolific and 

 nutritive; while the chief vegetable support of animals the permanently green grasses 

 flourish without industry or skill. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 



THE DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. 



HAT department of animated nature upon a view of 

 which we now enter, presents to our attention the 

 same wide diffusion of its objects, variety of or- 

 ganisms, and gradual advance from the most simple 

 to the more perfect and majestic forms, together 

 with a precise adaptation to different external cir- 

 cumstances, which characterises the productions of 

 the vegetable world. The high ice-clad mountains, 

 the level and parched deserts, together with the 

 " deep unfathomed caves of ocean," have their re- 

 spective animal tribes ; while the bowels of the earth 

 are not devoid of locomotive tenants, as in the case 

 of the caverns of Carniola, where the Proteus an- 

 guinus sustains existence in the perpetual darkness, 

 writhing and languishing upon any transition to the 

 realms of day without some protection from the light. 

 The study of animals, as evidenced by the extant 

 records of observation, commenced with Aristotle, 

 although it formed an accomplishment of the wise 



Jewish king to speak not only " of the trees, from the cedar of Lebanon even to the 

 hyssop which springeth out of the wall, "but also "of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping 

 things, and of fishes." But from the time of the celebrated Greek, the science of zoology 

 made little progress, till our countryman Ray addressed himself to a methodical arrange- 

 ment of animals, founded upon their difference of structure, and originated a system 

 which Linngeus expanded and improved, and left for Cuvier to re-arrange and perfect. 

 The more recent results obtained, have chiefly been an extension of the sphere of vitality 

 by Ehrenberg's brilliant discoveries on the demeanour of minute life in the ocean, which 

 have opened to our knowledge a thickly-peopled world of microscopical living atoms in 

 the oceanic abyss, some of which have but the estimated diameter of one three thousandth 

 of a line. It is difficult for a thoughtful mind to decide, whether admiration is more 

 deservedly challenged by the vast or the minute forms of living existence around us ; 

 but ,the adaptation of both to fulfil the purposes of their being, and the varieties which 

 intervene between the two extremes, cannot be carefully observed, without a conception 

 the most exalted of the fertility of the Creating Mind, and the richness of the Creation. 

 Evident as was the fact to Lucretius, it is still more open to our own observation : 



" Thus nature varies : man, and brutal beast, 

 And herbage gay, and scaly fishes mute, 

 And all the tribes of heaven, o'er many a sea, 

 Through many a grove that wing, or urge their song 



