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1. About 260 species of terrestrial Carnivora are known, divisible into fifty-eight genera and eight families.

2. They are distributed pretty equably over all the Regions of the earth except Australia, where the Dingo (possibly introduced) is their only representative.

Notopelagia.

3. The only Carnivores in Madagascar are Civets (Viverrida), and out of the seven genera of that family represented there six are peculiar.

4. There are no Bears (Urside) in the Ethiopian Region.

5. The Raccoons (Procyonidæ), with a single exception, are peculiar to the New World, where they may perhaps replace the Civets (Viverride), which are confined to the Old World.

6. The Marine Carnivora consist of three families which are divided into eleven genera and about twenty-six species.

7. The Walruses are characteristic of the Arctic Seas and the Sea-lions of the Antarctic, but in the Pacific the Sea-lions are also found in the North.

8. The Seals (Phocida) are both Arctic and Antarctic, but are represented by quite different genera in these two

areas.

CHAPTER XI

DISTRIBUTION OF INSECTIVORES, BATS,

AND RODENTS

SECTION I-INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

THE three Orders, to which it is proposed to devote the present chapter, contain the most difficult and least known members of the whole class. They are very numerous, especially the two latter groups, nearly all of small size, and in most parts of the world have been very imperfectly studied. Within these last few years large additions have been made to our knowledge of them, especially in the case of the Rodents, and their proper systematic arrangement is still a matter of much discussion amongst naturalists. Under these circumstances, and looking to the fact that these small mammals are of much less general interest than their larger brethren, it is not proposed to go very fully into the subject of their geographical distribution, but merely to point out some of the leading and less controvertible facts known upon this part of their history. We will commence with the Insectivores, which are generally allowed to be in many respects allied to the Carnivores, although they present certain points in their structure which appear to show a probability of their original descent from much lower forms.

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