372 
[part II. 
ISLAND LIFE. 
named by the Portuguese Formosa; or “ The Beautiful.” Till 
quite recently it was a terra incognita to naturalists, and we 
owe all our present knowledge of it to a single man, the late 
Mr. Robert Swinhoe, who, in his official capacity as one of our 
consuls in China, visited it several times between 1856 and 1866, 
besides residing on it for more than a year. During this period 
he devoted all his spare time and energy to the study of natural 
history, more especially of the two important groups, birds and 
mammals ; and by employing a large staff of native collectors 
and hunters, he obtained a very complete knowledge of its 
fauna. In this case, too, we have the great advantage of a very 
thorough knowledge of the adjacent parts of the continent, in 
great part due to Mr. Swinhoe’s own exertions during the twenty 
years of his service in that country. 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. 1 
Physical features of Formosa . — The island of Formosa is 
nearly half the size of Ireland, being 220 miles long, and 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 productions, 
1 Mr. Swinhoe died in October, 1877, at the early age of forty-two. His 
writings on natural history are chiefly scattered through the volumes of the 
Proceedings of the Zoological Society and 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). 
