INTRODUCTORY. 
5 
hustling life of the plains, or more probably have 
become moulded into some advanced and perfected 
type, like the great ruminants of the lowlands. There 
were these possibilities of zoology to encourage ex¬ 
ploration ; and another interesting feature in the fauna 
and flora of high mountains is that they often retain 
vestiges of an older nature, that has long since been 
supplanted in lower levels by a new reign. In this 
w r ay Kini Balu, the lofty mountain of Borneo, preserves 
on its upper slopes an Australian flora long since 
superseded in the plains below by the vegetation of 
India. On the Alps reappear the butterflies of Arctic 
Europe. The Abyssinian mountains can show genera 
and species of animals and plants from temperate 
countries north and south, from Europe and the Cape 
of Good Hope, and consequently the question as to the 
relations of the fauna and flora of Kilima-njaro, the 
highest mountain known in Africa, with that of other 
regions, was one of great interest, and one which, how¬ 
ever decided, might solve many curious puzzles as to 
the geographical distribution of living forms. 
If we should discover around the snows of this huge 
mass of extinct volcanoes the gentians and edelweiss of 
the Alps, or even other semi-Arctic forms, these would 
arouse a supposition that during some past glacial 
epoch the frigid North had sent its children into 
Central Africa, following the ice and snow. Or should 
we find, as we ascended Kilima-njaro, the birds, beetles, 
butterflies, and plants of the Cape of Good Hope, or 
even the antique types of Madagascar, this might show 
that the clump of snow mountains had served as one 
of the last footholds of the older autochthonous 
African nature, which was dispossessed and driven into 
distant islands and remote corners of the continent by 
