ALLEN ON GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MAMMALS. 359 



land mammals (excepting several subtropicopolitan genera of Bats and 

 a few Muriform Eodents) are common to these islands and the Papuan- 

 Australian division. The genera peculiar to the Philippines and Cele- 

 bes (except Ciiscus in the latter) have little if any more significance than 

 the occurrence in Borneo and Sumatra of a few genera wholly restricted 

 to one or the other of these last-named islands. 



Ceylon and the adjoining low-coast portions of the Hindostan Penin- 

 sula are more tropical in character than the plateau region to the north- 

 ward. While a few genera are restricted to this small area, and many 

 more species occur here that are not found to the northward, the differ- 

 entiation seems hardly great enough to warrant the separation of these 

 areas as a region of coordinate rank with the "Malayan". It hence 

 seems to me that Mr. Wallace has too emphatically recognized this com- 

 paratively unimportant difference in making it the basis of a distinct 

 subregion (termed by him the "Ceylonese Subregion"). The only mam- 

 malian genera peculiar to this division are a genus of Lemurs {Loris), 

 three genera (or subgenera) o^ IIerj)estince {Calictis, Tceniogale, Omjclio- 

 gale), and a genus of Mice {Platacanthotnys), each represented by a 

 single species, and, so far as known, of limited distribution. 



Continental Province. — As already intimated, the Continental Prov- 

 ince includes nearly all of Hindostan and Indo-China, or the whole 

 of the tropical portion of the Asiatic continent excepting Malacca and 

 the southern x)ortions of Tenasserim, Siam, Cambodia, and Cochin China. 

 It also extends into Soutbern China somewhat beyond the tropic (prob- 

 ably to the divide between the Li-kiang and Yang-tse-kiang Eiders), 

 and also to the southern slope of the Himalayas.* 



The plains of the Upper Indus appear, however, to belong to the 

 Temperate Eegion to the northward, as does probably most of the coun- 

 try northwest of Delhi. The greater part of the interior of the Hin- 

 dostan Peninsula has a less tropical character and a less varied fauna 

 than Bengal, Assam, and Burmah, situated under the same parallels. I 

 cannot agree, however, with Messrs. Blyth, Blandford, and von Pelzeln,t 



* " On the southern slope of the Himalayas there is everywhere, until it has been 

 cleared, luxuriant forest up to at least 12,000 feet above the sea, inhabited by a fauna 

 ■which extends, without any great change of generic forms, throughout the Malay 

 Peninsula and into the hill tracts of some at least of the Malay Islands." — Blandford, 

 Proc. Zoul. Soc. Lond., 187G, p. 632. 



tMr. Blyth makes "Hindostan proper, or the plains of Upper ludia east and south 

 of the North West desert; Dukhun, or tableland of the Peninsula cf India, and the inter- 

 vening territory, inclusive of the Vindhaian ghats ; Coromandel Coast and low northern 

 half of Ceylon" a subregion of his "Ethiopian Region" (Nature, vol. iii, j). 428). 

 Mr. Blandford holds that the ''hills of Southern India with the Malabar Coast and 

 Southern Ceylon form a province of the Malay region, whilst the greater i)ortiou of the 

 Indian peninsula is African in its afiinities" (Proc. Zool. Soc. Loud., 187G, p. 632). Von 

 Pelzeln considers India proper, from the Lower Brahmaputra River westward, a dis- 

 tinct primary region, which he calls the " hindostauische Region". His "malayische 

 Region" hence consists of Warm-temperate and Tropical Asia, minus the Hindostan 

 Peninsula, to which he adds the Philippines, Borneo, Bali, Java, and Sumatra. It 

 includes China as far as the Yang-tse-kiang River, and the Himalayan plateau from 



