340 Transactions of the South African Philosoiohical Society. 



types must, with corresponding Australian types, have taken their 

 origin in a great Southern land connecting South Africa and 

 Australasia. Others might have been added. It is certainly most 

 extraordinary that wherever we find the closest agreement between 

 the Floras of the two countries it is between the boxed-up Flora of 

 the Cape Province and the Flora of Australia, chiefly West and 

 South- West Australia, and when we consider that this connection 

 exists in widely separated orders, these facts become all the more 

 wonderful. Similar facts of distribution are also known amongst 

 animals without ready means of distribution. I will only refer to 

 Peripatus and Worms. 



The distribution of Periyatus (after Sedgwick, 1901) is as follows : 

 Cape Colony, Natal, Gaboon, New Zealand, Australia and Tasmania, 

 New Britain, the Malay Peninsula (and Sumatra ?), South and 

 Central iVmerica, and the West Indies. Peripatus cinctipes, Pure. 

 (Cape Colony and Natal), shows some Australasian features; 

 P. tholloni, Bouv., from Equatorial West Africa (Gaboon) shows 

 some neotropical features. 



The Malayan species, while showing some features of the 

 neotropical species, resemble the Australian species in others. 



Beddard (1893, p. 110) points out how important the distribution 

 of Earthworms is, to explain former land-connections, as they are 

 killed by sea-water. He comes to the conclusion that " the former 

 existence of a habitable Antarctic continent, with arms stretching 

 to New Zealand, Africa, and Patagonia, seems to be the clearest 

 way of explaining these facts " (of the distribution of the native 

 earthworms of the Southern Hemisphere). 



When I first approached this subject seriously, I came to the 

 same conclusion, namely, that a former connection with antarctic 

 lands would yield the key of the problem, but further study has 

 shown me that it is untenable. In the first place I became con- 

 vinced of the relative stability of the climate of South Africa, as 

 a consequence of which our plants could not have come from 

 Antarctic lands. In the second place, while there are undoubtedly 

 strong connections between the Flora of South Africa and the Flora 

 of southernmost South America, they are not by any means so 

 strong as with the Flora of Australia. The theory which I 

 formulated is briefly this : At the times when these common 

 types developed, probably in Lower Cretaceous times, possibly 

 even in Jurassic times, there was still a direct land-connection 

 between Australia and South Africa, that some of these types 

 were carried to South America by a later connection with Aus- 

 tralia, and that, on the other hand, Tropical Africa was able to 



