236 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL Society.  |[Feb. 2, 
vailed (and still prevails) in the fauna of New Zealand, to the almost 
entire exclusion of mammalia and reptiles. Any paleeontologist who 
saw the entire collection formed by my son alone could not but 
feel surprise at its extent and variety. I may venture to affirm that 
such an assemblage of the fossil bones of birds was never before seen 
in Europe—nearly one thousand specimens collected from various 
parts of the country, with scarcely any intermixture of those of any 
other class: it is a phenomenon as marvellous as the exclusively 
reptilian character of the fauna of the Wealden epoch. Im fact, 
New Zealand at the present time, as Dr. Dieffenbach observes, offers 
the most striking instance of an acknowledged fact in every branch 
of natural history, namely, that different areas of dry land are en- 
dowed with peculiar forms of animal and vegetable life; centres or 
foci of creation, so to speak, of certaim organic types. And this 
organic law, with the effects of which, m the palzeozoic 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 entire exclu- 
sion of the graminaceze,—and its fauna, comprising but two or three 
mammals and reptiles,—and the enormous development of the class of 
birds,—presents a general correspondence with the lands of the car- 
boniferous and triassic epochs. 
Australia and Van Diemen’s Land possess a flora equally peculiar 
and extraordinary, and a fauna unlike that of any other part of the 
world, including some of the most anomalous of existing forms, as 
for example that marvellous creature the Ornithorhynchus. These 
- countries, in the abundance and variety of the Cycadeacez, Arau- 
carie, &c.—in the marsupial character of the great proportion of 
the mammalia—and in the Terebratule and Trigonize, and the Cestra- 
ciont fishes which swarm in the seas that wash their shores, approxi- 
mate in their organic relations more nearly to those ancient lands of 
which the Stonesfield oolites are the debris, than to any of the pre- 
sent regions of the earth. 
Lastly, we have a reflected image, as it were, of the “‘ dge of 
Reptiles’’ of the secondary formations, in the exclusively reptilian 
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 equator, between five 
and six hundred miles westward of the American coast. “It is,” 
observes Mr. Darwin in his delightful Journal, “a little world withm 
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 reptiles allied to the Iguanide, which are known in 
no other part of the world ; and they are as completely distinct from 
