of .Una's Evolution. 



25 



would in many cases have been obliged to change from a purely 

 vegetarian diet. 



But this necessity of resorting to search for other kinds of 

 food would have the effect of shortening the upper limbs that 

 had hitherto been so much applied to purposes of swinging from 

 bough to bough in the luxuriant forests of fruit-trees. The 

 upper limbs would shorten from the cessation of this habit : the 

 hand would become developed into a more man-like organ of 

 prehension. The lower limbs, on the other hand, would become 

 stronger with exercise, and the foot, by frequent use, more adapted 

 to support the body, and would more and more depart from the 

 character of a prehensile organ. 



But there is one other set of circumstances remaining to be 

 considered, that must have greatly augmented the force of such 

 conditions as I have described, and therefore have greatly 

 increased the results I have shown, that must have flowed from 

 them. It is this : the dry land in the south of Europe and sub- 

 tropical Asia was steadily rising from the beginning of Miocene 

 times, became gradually hilly, then mountainous, till eventually 

 it became, as it is at the present day, " almost wholly a region of 

 mountains and elevated plateaus." As the greater part of this dis- 

 trict coincides with the south of the Palsearctic region or the 

 Mediterranean sub-region in Mr. Wallace's " Geographical Dis- 

 tribution," and as that writer has given an admirable description 

 of its present state, I cannot resist making the following ex- 

 tract : — " On the west, Spain is mainly a table-land of more than 

 2,000 feet elevation, deeply penetrated by extensive valleys, and 

 rising into lofty mountain-chains. Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, and 

 Sicily are all very mountainous, and much of their surface con- 

 siderably elevated. Further east, we have all European Turkey 

 and Greece, a mountain region with a comparatively small extent 

 of level plain. In Asia the whole country from Smyrna, through 

 Armenia and Persia, to the further borders of Afghanistan, is a 

 vast mountainous plateau, almost all above 2,000 feet, and 

 extensive districts above 5,000 feet in elevation. The only large 

 tract of low-land is the valley of the Euphrates. There is 

 also some low-land south of the Caucasus, and in Syria the 

 valley of the Jordan. In North Africa, the valley of the Nile, 

 aud the coast plains of Tripoli and Algiers, are almost the only 

 exceptions to the more or less mountainous and plateau-like 

 character of the country" (pp. 199. 200). 



The more eastward part of sub-tropical Asia, namely, the 

 north and north-east of India, is so well known to be moun- 

 tainous that it needs no description. 



Now, in order to prove that the whole of this district of 

 Southern Europe and sub-tropical Asia has been gradually raised 



