CHAP. XII.] 
THE ORIENTAL REGION. 
321 
among Brenthkke; with an immense number and variety of 
Anthotribidae, Heteromera, Malacoderma, and Phytophaga. 
The Oriental Sub-regions. 
The four sub-regions into which we have divided the Oriental 
region, are very unequal in extent, and perhaps more so in 
productiveness, but they each have well-marked special features, 
and serve well to exhibit the main zoological characteristics of 
the region. As they are all tolerably well defined and their 
faunas comparatively well-known, their characteristics will be 
given with rather more than usual detail. 
I. Hindostan , or Indian Sub-region. 
This includes the whole peninsula of India from the foot of the 
Himalayas on the north to somewhere near Seringapatam on the 
south, the boundary of the Ceylonese sub-region being unsettled. 
The deltas of the Granges and Brahmaputra mark its eastern 
limits, and it probably reaches to about Cashmere in the north- 
west, and perhaps to the valley of the Indus further south • but 
the great desert tract to the east of the Indus forms a transition 
to the south Palsearctic sub-region. Perhaps on the whole the 
Indus may be taken as a convenient, boundary. Many Indian 
naturalists, especially Mr. Blyth and Mr. Blanford, are impressed 
with the relations of the greater part of this sub-region to the 
Ethiopian region, and have proposed to divide it into several, 
zoological districts dependent on differences of climate and vege- 
tation, and characterized by possessing faunas more or less allied 
either to the Himalayan or the Ethiopian type. But these sub- 
divisions appear far too complex to be useful to the general stu- 
dent, and even were they proved to be natural, would be beyond 
the scope of this work. I agree, however, with Mr. Elwes ii; 
thinking that they really belong to local rather than to geo- 
graphical distribution, and confound “ station” with “habitat/' 
Wherever there is a marked diversity of surface and vegetation 
the productions of a country will correspondingly differ; the 
groups peculiar to forests, for example, will be absent from open 
Y 
