T.\YL(JH: DuMJNANi'Y IN NATURE. 
•27 
The Fieridw though in its widest sense dispersed over ahnost all 
the known world woukl appear to embrace some of the most modern 
and dominant groups and its careful and analytical study should 
help to elucidate many points of phylogenetic and distributional 
interest. 
The genus hJrebid is apparently undoubtedly regressive and is 
now characteristic of hilly and mountain regions in this country and 
is being slowly driven northwards and westwards and to higher 
altitudes in the mountains, while it is a widely distributed group and 
extends almost over all the known world. The genus Parnassuts is 
also a waning group and is now in Europe confined to the mountains, 
its present metropolis being now the Asiatic continent. 
In Orthoptera the meagre information available clearly i)oints to 
the pre-eminence of the Central European species, the truth of the 
gradual migration of faunas and the accuracy of the eastern route of 
retreat of those weaker forms compelled by stress of competition to 
migrate therefrom. 
Dr. Malcolm Burr has recorded the existence in Moravia of an 
isolated aggregation of ancient species of Orthopter(c, with little or 
no affinity to the species inhabiting the surrounding country, and of 
which about eighty species were collected within a very limited area 
of poor and desolate land : their refuge being surrounded on all sides 
by the more modern and dominant species which had })robably 
dispossessed them of the neighbouring favourable ground, and 
remarked that this detached and exiled colony of ancient species 
strikingly recalled the present day Orthopterous fauna of the valley 
of the Volga and were probably the last relics of a former Central 
European fauna which has become dispossessed by more modern and 
later evolved species. 
In Botanical science, although a connected scheme of the distri- 
bution of life in connection with phylogeny and evolution has yet 
to be devised, yet the same principles undoubtedly govern the 
distribution of plants, as have been already demonstrated to exist in 
animal life. 
• Ecology, the new phase of botanical study, recognizes dominancy 
and the resulting expulsion of the more primitive and archaic species 
from certain regions or localities, as powerful factors in geographical 
distribution, for as Darwin has shown, the modified and improved 
descendants will tend to drive off' or extirpate the more primitive 
])arent forms, and usurp the places they occupied. 
The Vegetation of Europe, but especially North Central Europe, 
according to the famous botanists. Dr. Schimper and Prof. Warming, 
is of precisely the same highly organized and dominant character as 
that for which the various branches of the fauna are so pre-eminent. 
It is mainly what is termed Mesophytic by Warming, or Tropophytic 
by Schimper, and its constituent species are very plastic, or 
