34 MR. A. MURRAY ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL RELATIONS OF 



the ' Pacific Railroad Reports,' 47th parallel, and on the Co- 

 leoptera of Kansas and Eastern New Mexico, as verbally cor- 

 rected by him for me down to the most recent date, and only one 

 or two being added by myself. Some of the genera or species in 

 these lists may yet be met with in Eastern America ; but after 

 making allowance for this, enough would seem still to remain 

 to warrant us in holding that a certain proportion of these must 

 have reached America via Siberia, and that, in like manner, most 

 of those in the Eastern North Atlantic States have probably 

 originally come via Europe and Greenland. 



North America has no special fauna or flora of its own. That 

 which ib has is a mixture of the microtypal and Brazilian stirpes 

 intermingled with fresh importations of different dates, and mo- 

 dified by the advance and retreat of the glacial epoch ; but, on 

 the whole, the preponderating element in its fauna is the micro- 

 typal. What I am now pointing out with regard to Beetles 

 may be traced to a greater or less extent in every branch of zoo- 

 logy and botany. I could go over each, pointing this out ; but I 

 will wait until the fact is disputed. Its origin is of very old date, 

 the elements now respectively found in Europe and America 

 having been already settled in each country before the Miocene 

 time. Professor Heer's admirable papers on European fossil 

 Tertiary insects give us the means of inferring this, and at the 

 same time furnish arguments against his and Professor Unger's 

 scheme of the Miocene Atlantis, which they held to have united 

 Europe to America in the line of the Azores, and which, they 

 think, served as a bridge for the intercommunication of the 

 plants and animals in the two continents. That there was 

 formerly a continent in the Atlantic is, I think, proved to de- 

 monstration by the facts already mentioned regarding the faunas 

 of the Atlantic Islands. But that it reached America is gain- 

 said not only by the facts adduced in Professor Oliver's able 

 paper on the subject, published in the ' Natural History Review,' 

 and by those of other able naturalists, a resume of which I have 

 already given elsewhere (' Geographical Distribution of Mam- 

 mals '), but by the examination of Heer's lists of species, to 

 which I am about to refer. If the reader will turn to the Ap- 

 pendix, he will find in one of the Tables a list of all the genera of 

 Professor Heer's 'Miocene European Coleoptera,' with the ex- 

 ception of a very few, which he could not refer to known genera, 

 and which I have omitted. In that list I have noted in columns 



