728 The Seven Towns of Moqui. [ December, 
cate, while others remain to be discovered. The luxuriant vege- 
tation of the tropics throughout the entire year affords so much 
concealment that color may there be safely developed to a much 
greater extent than in climates where the trees are bare in win- 
ter, during which season the struggle for existence is most severe, 
and even the slightest disadvantage may prove fatal. Equally 
important, probably, has been the permanence of favorable con- 
ditions in the tropics, allowing certain groups to continue dom- 
inant for long periods, and thus to carry out in one unbroken 
line whatever development of plumage or color may once have 
acquired an ascendency. Changes of climatal conditions, and 
preéminently the Glacial epoch, probably led to the extinction 
of a host of highly developed and finely colored insects and birds 
in temperate zones, just as we know that it led to the extinction , 
of the larger and more powerful mammalia which formerly char-  _ 
acterized the temperate zone in both hemispheres. This view is 
supported by the fact that it is among those groups only which 
are now exclusively tropical that all the more extraordinary 
developments of ornament and color are found. The local causes 
of color will also have acted best in regions where the climatal 
conditions remained constant, and where migration was unnec- 
essary ; while whatever direct effect may be produced by light 
or heat will necessarily have acted more powerfully within the 
tropics. And, lastly, all these causes have been in action over an 
actually greater area in tropical than in temperate zones, while 
estimated potentially, in proportion to its life-sustaining power, 
the lands which enjoy a practically tropical climate (extending 
as they do considerably beyond the geographical tropics) are 
very much larger then the temperate regions of the earth. Com- 
bining the effects of all these various causes we are quite able to 
understand the superiority of the tropical parts of the globe, not 
only in the abundance and variety of their forms of life, but also 
as regards the ornamental appendages and vivid coloration which 
these forms present. 
THE SEVEN TOWNS OF MOQUL 
BY E. A. BARBER. 
AF early as the year 1540, Don Pedro de Tobar, one of the 
first Spanish adventurers, was dispatched by Coronado o 
the “ province of Tusayan” (the modern Moqui, situated ~ 
_ “Arizona, in longitude 110° to 111° west, and latitude 35° to 36° 
