The Geography of Mammals

Portada
K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited, 1899 - 335 páginas

Dentro del libro

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página 17 - Flower, WH, and Lydekker, R., An Introduction to the Study of Mammals, Living and Extinct, 1891.
Página 151 - ... at the end of the Miocene and the beginning of the Pliocene times gradually drove the northern inhabitants southwards.
Página 47 - Ratitse, or struthious birds, in New Zealand, Australia, Madagascar, and Patagonia. But the distribution of struthious birds is probably to be explained much in the same way as the distribution of other archaic forms, such as the lemurs and tapirs. They are remnants of what were once more widely spread groups. That this is likely to be the case is shown by the recent discovery, in other parts of the world (such as the Sewaliks of India, and the Eocenes of England and France) of the remains of other...
Página 49 - writes that the greater number not only of the species, but even of the genera " are peculiar and wholly restricted to these islands. It is, of course, among the smaller land-birds (Passeres) that this individuality is most marked; but even in the other groups, where the distribution is generally wider, the Hawaiian birds are, in many cases, local.
Página 217 - Pacific for a long period and have well availed themselves of this facility. Again, while the great Southern Ocean exhibits a considerable uniformity of marine mammalian life, we see the Northern waters divided into two distinctly recognizable regions by the interposed masses of land. All these facts, with the one exception of the supposed Atlantic Barrier, would tend in favour of the now generally accepted doctrine that the principal masses of land and water are not of modern origin, but have existed...
Página 209 - NOTOPELAGIA (VO'TOJ and v&ayor), containing the whole of the South Polar Ocean all round the globe south of the above-mentioned limits. We will now proceed to consider shortly the characteristic mammals of these six sea-regions. VI. The North Atlantic Sea-region, or Arctatlantis. Amongst the Pinnipeds two well-marked generic forms, the Grey Seal, Ifalichocnis, and the Bladder Seal, Cystophora, are exclusively confined to Arctatlantis.
Página 55 - Region is quite as remarkable for what it does not possess (linotypes) as for what it has. Everything points to the conclusion that during a long geological age, probably throughout the greater part of the Tertiary epoch, South America was entirely isolated from the rest of the world. Thus the present fauna has arisen from two quite different sources — first, from the original fauna of early Tertiary times ; and, secondly, from immigrants from the north, some of these being of rather long standing,...
Página 236 - Lemuria,' as the hypothetical continent which was originally the home of the Lemurs has been termed, must have extended across the Indian Ocean and the Indian Peninsula to the further side of the Bay of Bengal and over the great islands of the Indian Archipelago." Is this quite a case of the retention of their present shapes by the continents ? But there is more to be said in regard to this paragraph, and especially in respect to the use of the objectionable must. Turning back to pp. 149-50, we find...
Página 17 - Principal Ontological Regions of the Earth, and the Laws that Govern the Distribution of American Life. Bull. US Geol. Surv. No. 2, vol. 4, 1878, pp. 313-377. 1891. The Geographical Distribution of North American Mammals.
Página 46 - In the first place, we are here dealing with mammals alone, and it seems rather absurd to assign the value of a primary region to a group of small islands characterized by the almost entire absence of that class of animals with which we are most concerned. In the second place, looking at regions from a more general point of view, there is a great practical convenience (as Mr. Wallace has pointed out) in keeping the more or less equal divisions of the globe as primary divisions. It seems, therefore,...

Información bibliográfica