150 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [Jan. 13, 



b}- Conybeare to designate the Newer Red Sandstones of this 

 country, seems to me to be very fit for this purpose ; and in speaking 

 of the Poikihtic period, I should like to make its earlier and later 

 boundaries as hazy as possible, and to apply it exclusively to terres- 

 trial conditions and to land and freshwater faunas, without prejudice 

 to the limits in time of the marine conditions known as Permian and 

 Triassic. 



It does not appear to me that there is any necessary relation be- 

 tween the fauna of a given land and that of the seas of its shores. 

 The land faunae of Britain and of Japan are wonderfully similar ; 

 their marine faunae are in many ways different. Identical marine 

 shells are collected on the Mozambique coast and in the easternmost 

 islands of the Pacific ; while the faunae of the lands which lie within 

 the same range of longitude are extraordinarily different. What 

 now happens geographically to provinces in space, is good evidence 

 as to what, in former times, may have happened to provinces in 

 time ; and an essentially identical land-fauna may have been con- 

 temporary with several successive marine faunae. 



At present, our knowledge of the terrestrial faunae of past epochs 

 is so slight, that no practical difficulty arises from using, as we do, 

 sea-reckoning for land time ; but I think it highly probable that, 

 sooner or later, the inhabitants of the land Avill be found to have a 

 history of their own, — mixed up with that of the sea, indeed, but 

 independent of it, in some such relation as the histories of England 

 and that of France. 



If the terrestrial faunae which I thus propose to term Poikilitic, 

 were, in the historical sense of the word, contemporaneous, it would 

 appear to be highly probable that, at their epoch, as at the present 

 day, animals were distributed in distinct geographical provinces. 

 It cannot well be a matter of accident that, with such uniformity in 

 general fades, there is such diversity in detail between the four faunae 

 I have mentioned. And it is very interesting to remark that, just as 

 at the present day, the Poikilitic fauna of India had distinct and 

 independent relations, on the one hand, with that of Europe, and 

 on the other with that of South Africa. 



But I am disposed to think that there is a closer connexion than 

 that of mere analogy between the geographical distribution of ter- 

 restrial animals in the Triassic epoch and that which obtains at the 

 present day. 



In the famous sandstones of the Connecticut valley, in North 

 America, neither bones nor teeth have yet been discovered ; but the 

 foot-tracks show that either ornithoid Sauria, or true birds, or most 

 probably both, existed in the Poikilitic period. Some of these bird- 

 like creatures, such as the Brontozoimi, were of gigantic size. 

 They were associated with true reptiles, some of which, very pro- 

 bably, resembled the Hyperodapedon and Rhynchoscmrus of western 

 Europe. 



With these facts before one's mind, how striking do the characters 

 of the existing fauna of New Zealand appear ! Its one characteristic 

 reptile is Sphenodon, so extraordinarily similar to Hyperodapedon ; 



