Animal Geography. 
5i 
1877.] 
not by isothermal lines,* but by the will of the Creator. 
He thus withdraws the subject entirely from the domain of 
Science, forgetting that Absolute Reason will work not arbi- 
trarily, but according to fixed laws, even if the human 
intellect should not be equal to the task of their discovery. 
Dr. Prichard adopts, as his zoological provinces, the 
Arctic, the Temperate, and Equatorial regions of the old 
and new continents ; the Indian Archipelago ; New Guinea, 
with New Britain, New Ireland, and the island groups of 
the Pacific ; Australia proper ; and, lastly, the southern 
extremities of America and Africa. This classification 
might be very briefly dismissed if it did not, at first sight, 
seem to anticipate certain views put forward by Mr. Wallace 
in his earlier writings, and developed in the present work. 
He finds that the respective faunae of the western and 
eastern portions of the great Malay Archipelago differ essen- 
tially : hence he places the former group in his “ Oriental ” 
and the latter in his “Australian ” region, drawing his line 
of demarcation between Borneo and Celebes. Whether 
Dr. Prichard’s boundary falls in the same place, or, rather, 
more to the eastward between the Moluccas and New Guinea, 
it is evident that he considers the distinction between the 
Indian islands and New Guinea of no higher rank than that 
between the former and the south-eastern portion of the 
Asiatic continent, or than that between the latter and 
Australia. On the other hand, Mr. Wallace clearly demon- 
strates that widely as Australia differs from New Guinea in 
climate, soil, humidity, and state of surface, their respective 
faunae show a well-marked affinity. New Guinea and Bor- 
neo, almost identical in their meteorological conditions, are 
decidedly distinct in their forms of animal life. Hence we 
must decide that Mr. Wallace has not been anticipated by 
Dr. Prichard, and that the latter was evidently not aware of 
the importance of the truth which he had approached. 
Swainson’s arrangement has at least the merit of not re- 
quiring any novel terminology. His five grand divisions are 
simply Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. How 
a man of his reading and research could succeed in per- 
suading himself that the zoological distinction between 
Europe and Asia exceeded, or even equalled, those between 
Central Asia and India, or North and South America, 
respectively, might be an interesting puzzle for the labor- 
iously idle. Like Kirby, Swainson supposes that the various 
* It will be observed that the boundaries of Latreille’s regions are not 
necessarily isothermals. 
