423 



ISLAND LIFE 



PART II 



belonging to known genera, we find fifteen which have 

 undoubted African affinities, while five or six are as 

 decidedly Oriental, the genera or nearest allied species 

 being found in India or the Malay Islands. It is on the 

 presence of these peculiar Indian types that Dr. Hartlaub, 

 in his recent work on the Birds of Madagascar and the 

 Adjacent Islands, lays great stress, as proving the former 

 existence of " Lemuria " ; while he considers the absence 

 of such peculiar African families as the plantain-eaters, 

 glossy-starlings, ox-peckers, barbets, honey-guides, horn- 

 bills, and bustards — besides a host of peculiar African 

 genera — as sufficiently disproving the statement in my 

 Geographical Distrihction of Animals that Madagascar is 

 " more nearly related to the Ethiopian than to any other 

 region," and that its fauna was evidently " mainly derived 

 from Africa." 



But the absence of the numerous peculiar groups of 

 African birds is so exactly parallel to the same phenomenon 

 among mammals, that we are justified in imputing it to 

 the same cause, the more especially as some of the very 

 groups that are wanting — the plantain-eaters and the 

 trogons, for example, — are actually known to have 

 inhabited Europe along with the large mammalia which 

 subsequently migrated to Africa. As to the peculiarly 

 Eastern genera — such as Copsychus and Hypstpetes, with 

 a Dicrurus, a Ploceus, a Cisticola, and a Scops, all closely 

 allied to Indian or Malayan species — although very striking 

 to the ornithologist, they certainly do not outweigh the 

 fourteen African genera found in Madagascar. Their 

 presence may, moreover, be accounted for more satisfac- 

 torily than by means of an ancient Lemurian continent, 

 which, even if granted, would not explain the very facts 

 adduced in its support. 



Let us first prove this latter statement. 



The supposed " Lemuria " must have existed, if at all, 

 at so remote a period that the higher animals did not then 

 inhabit either Africa or Southern Asia, and it must have 



absolutely peculiar to the island, as are thirty-five of the genera. All the 

 peculiar birds but two are land birds. These are the numbers given in M. 

 Grandidier's great work on Madagascar. 



