164 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



these species and their ancestral forms — all the vicissi- 

 tudes of climate and all the changes of sea and land which 

 may have affected these migrations — the whole series of 

 actions and reactions which have determined the preserva- 

 tion of some forms and the extinction of others— in fact, 

 the whole history of the earth, inorganic and organic, 

 throughout a large portion of geological time." 



Now to invite your attention to so vast a subject as 

 this will, I am sure, appear a considerable presumption 

 on my part, and I will hasten to alleviate your apprehen- 

 sions by saying that my intention is only to consider one 

 order of one class of the British Fauna, and I do this 

 with the more confidence from the fact that of the distri- 

 bution of the British Coleoptera very little is really 

 known, and of its proximate derivation still less. It 

 therefore appears a safe topic on which to theorize, our 

 ignorance of facts allowing us a more unbiased freedom in 

 speculation. Apart, however, from this rather dubious 

 qualification, to render such an enquiry as this— that is, 

 the distribution and origin of the British Fauna — manage- 

 able, it becomes necessary to narrow the question down 

 to one small group of that fauna : one must attack it in 

 detail if one wishes to do so at all exhaustively. Further, 

 it appears to me that the Coleoptera or Beetles afford 

 particularly good material for such an enquiry, and here I 

 am not indeed sure whether it is not perhaps necessary to 

 defend the cause of the terrestrial invertebrate in limine, 

 so strong are the traditions of this room in favour of the 

 marine — so permeated is its very atmosphere with " mur- 

 murs and scents of the infinite sea." But it seems obvious 

 that when we come to talk about distribution your student 

 of terrestrial life has most to say. Fresh-water faunas are 

 another matter, but I venture to think that not much as 

 regards past earth movements, submersions and upheavals, 



