401 



ISLAND LIFE 



PART II 



years of his service in China. We possess, too, the further 

 advantage of having the whole of the available materials 

 in these two classes collected together by Mr Swinhoe 

 himself after full examination and comparison of specimens ; 

 so that there is probably no part of the world (if we 

 except Europe, North America, and British India) of whose 

 warm-blooded vertebrates we possess fuller or more 

 accurate knowledge than we do of those of the coast 

 districts of China and its islands.^ 



Physical Features of Formosa. — The island of Formosa is 

 nearly half the size of Ireland, being 220 miles long, anii 

 from twenty to eighty miles wide. It is traversed down 

 its centre by a fine mountain range, which reaches an 

 altitude of about 8,000 feet in the south and 12,000 feet in 

 the northern half of the island, and whose higher slopes 

 and valleys are everywhere clothed with magnificent 

 forests. It is crossed by the line of the Tropic of Cancer a 

 little south of its centre ; and this position, combined with, 

 its lofty mountains, gives it an unusual variety of tropical 

 and temperate climates. These circumstances are all 

 highly favourable to the preservation and development of 

 animal life, and from what we already know of its pro- 

 ductions, it seems probable that few, if any islands of 

 approximately the same size and equally removed from a 

 continent will be found to equal it in the number and 

 variety of their higher animals. The outline map (at page 

 392) shows that Formosa is connected with the mainland 

 by a submerged bank, the hundred-fathom line including 

 it along with Hainan to the south-west and Japan on the 

 north-east ; while the line of two-hundred fathoms includes 

 also the Madjico-Sima and Loo-Choo Islands, and may, 

 perhaps, mark out approximately the last great extension 

 of the Asiatic continent, the submergence of which isolated 

 these islands from the mainland. 



Animal Life of Formosa. — We are at present acquainted 



^ Mr. Swinhoe died in October, 1877, at the early age of forty-two. His 

 writings on natural history are chiefl}^ scattered through the volumes of the 

 Proceedings of the Zoological SocictAj sai^ The Ibis; the whole being sum- 

 marised in his Catalogue of the Mammals of South China and Formosa {P. 

 Z. S., 1870, p. 615), and his Catalogue of the Birds of China and its 

 Islands [P. Z. S., 1871, p. 337). 



