40 Mantell on Fossil Remains from New Zealand. 



nomenon as marvelous as the exclusively reptilian character of 

 the fauna of the Wealdeu epoch. In fact, New Zealand at the 

 present time, as Dr. Dieflenbach observes, offers the most striking 

 instance of an acknowledged fact in every branch of natural his- 

 tory, namely, that different areas of dry land are endowed with 

 peculiar forms of animal and vegetable life; centres or foci of 

 creation, so to speak, of certain organic types. And this organic 

 law, with the effects of which, iu the palaeozoic and secondary 

 ages, our geological researches have made us familiar, appears to 

 have continued in unabated energy to the present moment- In 

 fact, the most remarkable apparent anomalies in the terrestrial 

 faunas and floras of the secondary epochs are not without modern 



parallels. 



Thus New Zealand, with its peculiar flora, characterized by 

 the predominance of ferns, club-mosses, &c, to the almost en- 

 tire exclusion of the gramineae, — and its fauna, comprising but 

 two or three mammals and reptiles, — and the enormous develop- 

 ment of the class of birds, — presents a general correspondence 

 with the lands of the carboniferous and triassic epochs. 



Australia and Van Diemeirs Land possess a flora equally pe- 

 culiar and extraordinary, and a fauna unlike that of any other 

 part of the world, including some of the most anomalous of ex- 

 isting forms, as for example that marvelous creature the Orni- 

 thorhynchus. These countries, in the abundance and variety of 

 the Cyeadeacse, Araucarice, &c. — in the marsupial character of 

 the great proportion of the mammalia — and in the Terebratulte 

 and Trigoniae, and the Cestraciont fishes which swarm in the 

 seas that wash their shores, approximate in their organic rela- 

 tions more nearly to those ancient lands of which the Stonesfield 

 oolites are the debris, than to any of the present regions of the 

 earth. 



Lastly, we have a reflected image, as it were, of the " Age of 

 Reptiles" of the secondary formations, in the exclusively reptil- 

 ian character of the quadrupeds of the Galapagos Islands, one 

 species of mouse being the only indigenous mammalian. This 

 Archipelago is a group of volcanic islands situated under the equa- 

 tor, between five and six hundred miles westward of the Ameri- 

 can coast. "It is," observes Mr. Darwin in his delightful Jour- 

 nal, "a little world within itself; most of the organic "productions 

 are aboriginal creations found nowhere else. Seeing every height 

 crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava- 

 streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period 

 geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out 

 These islands swarm with herbivorous marine and terrestrial rep- 

 tiles allied to the Iguanidae, which are known in no other part of 

 of the world; and they are as completely distinct from all other 

 existing reptiles, as are the extinct Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. 



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