' 



XIV 



Introduction. 



i 



(March 30). He had been led to consider it while drawing up the intro- 

 ductory chapter which was to preface these catalogues, for in a letter to me 

 dated 15th July of that year he refers to this MS. as follows : — 



" I suppose that Phayre showed you my sketch of what I conceive to 

 be the true regions and sub-regions of S. E. Asia, and I expected that he 

 would have modified somewhat my notions with regard to the provinces into 

 which I venture to divide the Indo- Chinese sub-region, but he seems to have 

 assented to them altogether. Only yesterday I received the ' Proceedings of 

 the Asiatic Society ' for April and May last, and the ' Journal of the Asiatic 

 Society of Bengal/ Part II., No. 1, 1871, and in p. 84 of the 'Proceedings' 

 I find some remarks by Stoliczka which quite confirm my views, only that I 

 think that, with regard to the extension of the Malayan fauna into India, he 

 should rather have said Southern India, because the African affinities of 

 Central and Northern India, inclusive of the Siwalik Deposits, are of ancient 

 date, as shown by the occurrence of Bos namadicus in Central India, which 

 is barely separable from the European B. primigenius (a type of Bos which is 

 elsewhere only known from Europe), and by the presence of giraffes and of 

 antelopes of African type in the Siwalik Deposits. I have such an enormous 

 mass of valuable facts to deal with, that I gave over making them public in 

 driblets at the meetings of the Zoological Society ; and I have now time and 

 undisturbed leisure to treat of them in a work which I am preparing on ' The 

 Origination of Species,' a subject upon which I think I can throw some 

 light."* 



As pointed out in a note, Blyth's 'Austral- Asian region' is generally the 

 same with Dr. Sclater's 'Indian region,' minus Hindustan proper, or the plains 

 of Upper India east and south of the north-west desert— the Dukhun or table- 

 land of the Peninsula with the intervening territory, inclusive of the Yindhyan 



Ghats— the Coromandel Coast and the low northern half of Ceylon all of 



which Blyth places in his Ethiopian region. What remains of India after 

 this large deduction Blyth distributes through three sub-regions, viz. the 

 Himalayan, Indo-Chinese, and Cinghalese. India cannot, he argues, be 

 treated as a natural zoological province : it is a border-land in which different 

 zoological regions meet, and one, therefore, "of extraordinarily complex 

 zoological affinities." Burma of course falls within his Indo-Chinese sub- 



* Among the papers left by Blyth is one headed < Origination of the Various Races of 

 Man,' which he may have intended to form part of the book here referred to. It contains 

 nothing original, but brings together numerous points of resemblance and contrast observable 

 in the several groups of the order Primates. 



