252 The Progress of Zoology. 



species altogether, but with neither of these incitements, it is 

 perhaps being extinguished with still greater speed in Ceylon 

 and India. There is a saving clause in the fact now established, 

 that elephants' will breed in captivity, but against it must be set 

 the fact that in captivity it does not pay for its keep, and is 

 scarcely worth the attention of those who employ it either for 

 burden or draught. The elephant has too much character, too 

 high a reasoning faculty, to be perfect as a servant ; it has too 

 many whims, too many eccentricities of temper, and consumes 

 far more food than it earns in harness. Thus economically re- 

 garded, everything is against its preservation, and when the 

 wild herds disappear, there will probably remain but few in a 

 domesticated state, for unlike the horse, ox, ass, and sheep, it is 

 both unprofitable and unmanageable. 



Zoology has been somewhat restricted in aim, spite of its 

 own breadth as a science and the liberality of its leading culti- 

 vators. It owes most of its advance in recent times in the 

 absorption into its circle of the facts of past biological history 

 to Professor Owen, whose ' ' Palasontology" is a sort of panorama 

 of extinct forms, placed side by side with their existing con- 

 geners and representatives. Australia and New Zealand have 

 not only furnished innumerable subjects of anomalous kinds for 

 the consideration of system makers, but they have opened the 

 way for rays of light to fall on the present direct from the past, 

 by their illustrations of geological eras. Nothing more strik- 

 ingly exemplifies the relationship that subsists between all 

 departments of knowledge, than the aid which zoology and 

 geology respectively offer to each other. The existing fauna 

 of Ceylon, as analyzed by Sir Emerson Tennent, affords very 

 satisfactory indications that the island is, in no geological or 

 zoological sense, an outlier of the vast Indian continent, but a 

 site sui generis like Australia, detached not only in its geography 

 from the neighbouring continent, but in its chronology also, 

 and in all its organic productions. On the other hand, geology 

 does more than whisper of the connection that once subsisted 

 between England and the Continent of Europe by way of the 

 straits of Dover, for it furnishes all the evidence requisite to 

 establish the conclusion that the separation was effected not 

 very long antecedent to the commencement of the historic era. 

 Zoology does not touch the chronology of the question, but it 

 affixes the general conclusion j and we begin to discover that, 

 however valuable are the floras and faunas of Britain, they tell 

 but half their proper story unless considered in connection with 

 the floras and faunas of the Continent. 



Two admirable works have recently been published, with 

 the object of indicating the relations of British and Continental 

 zoology. That by Lord Clermont is a compilation, but it is 



