204 Notices of Memoirs—Henry O. Forbes. 
affinity with the present Australian forms, came no doubt vid North 
America from Hurope. The ancestors of the cassowaries, moas,. 
and kiwis are supposed by Mr. Wallace to have come from New 
Guinea into the north of East Australia, and to have spread thence 
to New Zealand in Cretaceous times. Again the Hocene of Patagonia 
has produced the remains of giant struthious birds— Brontornis 
burmeisteri—which can have been the ancestors on the Antarctic 
Continent, not only of the Australian and New Zealand forms, but 
of all the tridactile forms—of the “pyornis of Madagascar, as well 
as the Neotropical rheas. Recent remains of pyornis received at 
the British Museum show in the tibia, or leg bones especially, a 
‘very close resemblance to that of the moa. The metatarsi of the 
moa and A¥pyornis also show many points in common. ‘The Mada- 
gascar, the Australian, and the New Zealand Ostriches would at 
least seem to have had a common ancestor.” 
«That a current of life has flowed from south to north, as well as. 
vice versd, has strong support lent to it by the results of Sir William 
Macgregor’s recent botanical collections in New Guinea. In the 
highland vegetation of that country, along with an extensive display 
of heaths and whortleberries—forms of vegetation which are scanty 
in Australia—there is also a marked preponderance of far southern 
types, belonging to Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. In 
Borneo also have been found plants common to the Papuan highlands, 
and also plants from high southern latitudes. So many plants from 
high southern latitudes of common origin, typical of Tasmania, of 
continental Australia, of the Southern Ocean, and of Patagonia, point 
to a land connection of portions of New Guinea with an Antarctic 
continent. As there are, moreover, abundant evidences of great 
volcanic action over all the region, in New Zealand, South America, 
Mascarenia, and the Antarctic Islands, the permutations and com- 
binations of the ups and downs of these lands, the openings and 
closings of the gates, paths, or stepping stones, are beyond our 
computation.” ; 
Mr. Forbes sums up in these words :— 
Shortly, therefore, ‘it is highly probable,’ as Mr. Blanford says, 
‘that many forms of terrestrial life . . . originated in the southern 
hemisphere; and... it is far from improbable that the Antarctic 
continent was the original area of development.’ It seems to me, 
therefore, highly probable that Professor Huxley’s divisions of the 
Globe, in which he is followed by Professor Kitchen Parker, accord- 
ing to the distribution of life into a northern and into a southern 
land—an arctogoea and a notogcea—will turn out to be the two 
fundamental biological divisions of the Globe. That there was a 
centre of development at both poles, and the wanderings and 
migrations of the fauna and flora, northwards or southwards, from 
age to age, and from one side of the Equator to the other, were 
regulated by glacial and genial periods, and from east to west by 
the elevation and subsidence of an extensive land, in the southern 
hemisphere as in the northern. 
These deductions as to an Antarctic continent, made on biological 
