24 
William Morton Wheeler. 
Relikte bezeichnet werden. Diese Betrachtungsweise schließt jedoch 
nicht aus, daß sich auch an manchen Stellen abseits von der Urheimat 
neue Genera differenziert haben können, die wir dann als Endemismen 
zu bezeichnen hätten. So weit ich momentan die Sache überblicken 
kann, scheint mir jedoch in keinem Falle zur Erklärung der Ameisen- 
verbreitung die Annahme großer versunkener Kontinente, die einst 
quer über die großen Ozeane reichten, notwendig zu sein; daß solche 
Kontinente nie existierten, soll damit natürlich noch nicht be- 
hauptet sein.“ 
While I agree with Handliesch that we need not, in the present 
state of our knowledge of Formicid distribution, postulate the existence 
of great sunken continents, and while I am willing to admit that the 
family may have originated in Eurasia, I am unable to lay much stress 
on his reasons for this latter assumption. In the first place, as I have 
partially shown on p. 9, the number of cosmopolitan or even of 
tropicopolitan genera in the European Tertiary is not great. Formicä 
is by no means cosmopolitan, and this genus as well as Aphcenogaster 
and Camponotus would very probably not be found to be richly re- 
presented in the later Tertiary if the species referred to them by Heer 
and other students of his day were to be reexamined in the light of 
modern taxonomic definitions. In the Baltic amber there is only one 
species of Camponotus and though there are three of Aphcenogaster, 
two of these are represented by only a few specimens. In the second 
place, a hasty preliminary examination of several thousand ants from 
the Florissant shales of Colorado, which are attributed to the Miocene, 
indicates that the North American Tertiary ant-fauna was by no 
means as insignificant as IIandlirsch seems to imply. As the existence 
of these numerous fossils makes it very probable that there must have 
been ants in North America during the Eocene, the migration of the 
family from Eurasia, if it took place as Handlirsch supposes, must 
have antedated the beginning of the Tertiary at the latest. I deem 
it advisable, however, to postpone further discussion of this subject, 
tili I can take it up with fuller and more precise data in my work 
on the fossil ants of Florissant. 
