808 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



furnished to us by the fact that a certain island of blue colour, placed 

 by Professor Huxley in the ' Dark Continent' of Africa to indicate 

 the presence in Upper Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia of some traces 

 of the Australioid type, corresponds with the area in that continent 

 whence most or all of her few gifts of valuable cultivated plants and 

 valuable domesticated animals have come to us, viz., the cotton 

 plant, and, very probably, the date-palm ; the ass, from the native 

 stock Asinus taeniopus ; and the cat, from the native stock Felis 

 maniculata. 



Of the two arms into which the eastward end of this area bifur- 

 cates, the upper or northward one would correspond with the 

 Kuenlun range, and the southward with the Himalayas ; Ladak, 

 and part of the table-land of Thibet, lying between them. It is in 

 the Kuenlun range that Jade mines are found. 



The third map, being one of Johnston's Charts of the World on 

 blank Mercator's Projection, has been coloured so as to illustrate 

 the following facts in the distribution of certain plants and certain 

 minerals connected with the ancient development and subsequent 

 progress of human civilisation. One region is coloured as it is 

 in the ' Planteogeographisk Atlas/ tav. ii, of Professor Schouw, 

 Copenhagen, 1824, so as to show the distribution of the fitis 

 vitifera over the countries forming the northern and southern 

 shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, over Asia Minor, 

 Palestine, and Mesopotamia, over the lowlands both of Astrakhan 

 and Turan, and along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, so as 

 to end at the eastern extremity of that chain. In nearly the same 

 latitude as that eastern extremity, and about in the same longitu- 

 dinal line as the long axis of the Peninsula of Malacca, a spot of 

 another colour marks the situation of the amber mines of Burmah^, 

 while four spots of yet a third colour in British Burmah, 

 Banca 2, Celebes, and Khorassan ^, respectively indicate localities in 



^ For the Amber mines of Burmah see Balfour's ' Indian Cyclopaedia,' s. v., 1871 ; 

 and Keith Johnston's * Royal Atlas,' map. 28, in loco lat. 26° 20', 



^ For the existence of tin together with copper in Burmah see Mortillet, ' Revue 

 d'Anthropologie,' i. 1875, p. 653. 



^ For the similar collocation of the two metals which when combined make bronze 

 in Khorassan and elsewhere in Central Asia south of the Caspian, see v, Baer, 'Archiv 

 fur Anthropologic/ ix, 4, p. 262, 1877. We know from the same irrefragable authority. 

 Bulletin Acad. Sci. St. P^tersbourg. torn. xvii. p. 41 7-431, 1859, and torn, i., i860, 

 pp. 35-37, that the date-palm is still represented a little to the nort^ of these deposits 

 of tin and copper, at Sari, in the as yet Persian province of Mazanderan on the south 



