the union of the Palæarctic and Nearctic regions from the similarity, or rather the many similarities, to be found in their faunas, but the Sclaters argue that these affinities are only of recent origin, and that "palæontological evidence seems to show that, out of all the four regions embraced under the term 'Arctogœa,'[1] the North American or Nearctic Region was the first to be separated from the main mass, and that the similarity is a comparatively modern element in the character of the two faunas."
It is unnecessary to refer to the most original contribution to this volume, in the chapter on the Distribution of Marine Mammals, for, as before mentioned, this article has already appeared in these pages. Now that the Terrestrial and Marine Mammals have been treated on the Sclaterian method, we may hope that the other orders may be studied and published in the same manner. Of the fifty illustrations contained in the text, no fewer than forty have been designed by T. Smit for this work; there are also eight coloured maps; and the volume may be well accepted, so far as Mammals are concerned, and for a long time to come, as the last authoritative statement on the subject.
The study of Prehistoric Man was once completely relegated to the domain of Archæology: it is now no longer neglected by the historian. It is one of the greatest benefits arising from the evolutionary method in the proper study of Zoology, that both Embryology and Palæontology are now considered of primary importance if we wish to understand the problem of present animal existence. Science to-day is more interested in the past than in the future of animal life, and when we really know the first we may perhaps be able in some sense to predicate the second. It is the hither that will guide us to the whither. As we read these pages, commencing with the speculative Palæozoic Conodonts,
- ↑ Europe, Asia, Africa, Asiatic islands down to Wallace's line, and North America down to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
