to fulfil the avowed aim of its author than the Zoological Recreations.'

The low condition of elementary zoological instruction in this country greatly enhances the value of any lucubration calculated to diffuse a taste for the pursuit. Mr. Broderip, however, is by no means to be numbered among the mere light volunteers of Zoology. He has taken an important share in the dissemination of sound systematic principles by his learned and lucid series of articles in the Penny Cyclopædia; and he has contributed no inconsiderable quota of original discovery and research, especially on his favourite field of conchology, in numerous memoirs published in the Zoological Journal, in the Appendixes to voyages of discovery, and in the Transactions of the London Zoological Society, of which he has from the first been an active supporter."

It is due to the high estimation of Natural History in the continental universities, that since the commencement of the present century, and more especially since the conclusion of the war, few sciences have made more rapid and extensive progress than Zoology. Its general aspect has been changed, its scope expanded, its relations multiplied. It has yielded unexpected aids to other sciences, and it begins to throw light on questions of the deepest and most general interest. The discovery of the specific characters of a new shell, insect, bird, or fish, ceases to have the importance, even in the eyes of the adept, which was assigned to it in the days of the respectable author of the Naturalist's Miscellany. A Shaw's Zoology can hardly be said any longer to exist. The Zoology of Cuvier and his numerous disciples has higher aims and aspirations. Duly appreciating the discriminator of specific distinctions, and acknow ledging the necessity of accurate definitions of so-called species as the groundwork of the science, the philosophical student of the animal kingdom keeps a steady eye on the generalizations that are to be raised upon these materials. Zoology has to him as wide a signification as Botany has to the investigator of plants. It comprises not merely the systematic catalogue of the known species and varieties, but a knowledge of their structure, and of their natural affinities as interpreted by the totality of their structure, of the relations of their organization to living properties

*It is with pain that we see the funds of this institution, which is an honour and ornament to the metropolis, suffering from causes which have produced a general regard to the individual economies, and from the reflux in the tide of fashion which once set so strongly in its favour. Of the intrinsic claims of the Zoological Society to public support, the present condition of its gardens and menagerie, its museum and library, will bear ample testimony. At no period since its establishment has a greater number and variety of rare and interesting animals been exhibited, or exhibited with more attention to their comfort and the display of their native habits.

and

and habits,-of the laws that govern the development of that organization, of the type to which its variations may be referred, of the mutations which the different parts of the body undergo in passing from phase to phase in the life of the individual, and of the metamorphoses of the same or homologous parts traced from species to species. Zoology-so comprehended and applied-unfolds the harmonious principle of similitude which reigns amidst the infinite seeming diversity of its objects, and demonstrates the unity of the Designer, as plainly as the exact adaptation of each living unit to its place and sphere in creation bespeaks His power and goodness.

Earth, air, water have each their appropriate inhabitants. The worm and the mole are constructed to bore the very substance of the dark and dense element; they are truly of the earth, earthy. The swallow, insatiable in pursuit of insect-food, wheeling on unwearied wing throughout the long summer's day—and the midges, whose ranks it thins as they weave their mazy dance in the evening sun-beam, are creatures of the air and light. The shoals of fish that, with their fins and shining scales, glide under the green wave,' are as strictly denizens of the water. The adaptation of form and structure in each of these beings to its particular element is perfect, and the relation appreciable by the least practised observer. It needs but a little insight into the structure of the animal frame to discern the same adaptation of it to external circumstances in the species which have a more mixed dependence on the surrounding elements; in the mollusca, for example, that exist in a medium of water, but in their pearly shells at ease, attend moist nutriment' at the bottom; or in those terrestrial creatures which, moving in the rarer atmosphere, are so far the slaves of gravitation as to be unable to raise themselves above the firm surface of earth; or in those that float upon the water and breathe the air; or as those more truly amphibious forms that breathe and have the command of both elements. There are even amongst the Insect world-as, for instance, the water-scorpion (Nepa) and waterbeetle (Dytiscus)-species gifted with such varied instruments of locomotion that they are qualified for all the habitable elements; and such a creature, like Milton's fiend,

-Through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues its way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.'

The relations which subsist between the modifications of the organic machinery and the media in and upon which it is destined to operate, are clearly traceable and readily comprehensible. In them, from the days of Socrates to those of Paley, the philoso

pher

pher has found his most striking illustrations of a superintending Providence. But there are other, and as yet more obscure relations subsisting between animals and their habitats, the existence of which Zoology has but of late years made known, and the nature of which it will be the future business of that science to unfold. The turtle of Malabar (Chelonia Dussumieri), for example, is by no means the same species with that of the Isle of Ascension (Chelonia Mydas), although the sea in which they swim is warmed by equal floods of solar influence, and stored with equal abundance of the food of these esculent reptiles. It could not have been unreasonable to presuppose that the same species of Fishes would exist in parallel latitudes of the northern and the southern hemispheres; and the accounts which we occasionally meet with of the kinds of produce in our remote colonies would seem to show this to be in some respects the case. In one of the South Australian (Adelaide) newspapers for October, 1845, we read, for example, of whitings 6d. per dozen; flounders 6d. per pair; mullet 30 for 1s,; cod 2d. per lb. But none of these fishes are even generically allied to their namesakes and representatives developed in the seas that wash our mild southern coasts; although the circumstances of light and heat, the constitution of the water, or the coast-line, offer no modifications explanatory of the essential differences which rigorous observation proves to exist in the fishes of the British and Australian seas.

Facts as remarkable, and at present inexplicable, have been brought to light in regard to the geographical distribution of Birds. It might be supposed that the power of traversing space, possessed by the majority of this class, would free them from the restrictions imposed upon less gifted natures in regard to range; but the hawks and eagles of Africa differ from those of America, and these again from the birds of prey in Australia. On the hypothesis that their first progenitors started from a common centre, it is conceivable that some may have winged their way across one or two wide oceans, whilst others tarried on the intermediate continent or nearer home; but had any such migratory instincts continued to operate, the peculiar localisation of certain forms of the strong-winged Raptores must long since have been overpassed.

The phenomena of the distribution of the great terrestrial wingless Birds are still more perplexing. Almost every large tract of dry land under a warm or tropical sun supports its peculiar struthious bird. Thus Africa has the true two-toed ostrich, the type of the family; South America has a threetoed ostrich; the rich islands of the Indian Archipelago have their cassowary; Australia has its emeu :-but these four sorts

of

of great birds, alike incapable of flight, and alike with unwebbed feet, differ from each other not merely specifically, but, according to the current value of zoological distinctions, in their wider characters. They are entered, accordingly, in the catalogues under different nomina generica :-Struthio, Rhea, Casuarius, Dromaius. The question of the cause or condition of this insulated and widely-parted location of such nonmigratory birds is one that naturally suggests itself to the inquiring mind, and the enigma becomes more puzzling and more provocative of attempts at solution, when the progress of zoology further discloses the fact, that small islands have, or had recently, their peculiar wingless terrestrial birds, generically distinct from each other, as well as from the larger species of the continents. Thus New Zealand has now its Apteryx, just as, two centuries ago, Rodriguez had its Solitaire, and Mauritius its Dodo.*

The geographical distribution of Quadrupeds seems equally mysterious. The elephant of Africa is specifically distinct from that of Asia; the rhinoceros of the Asiatic continent is onehorned: all the known rhinoceroses of Africa are two-horned. The giraffe and hippopotamus are at present peculiar to Africa. Not any of the indigenous quadrupeds in South America are of the same species with those of the old world-very few are of the same genus. The American monkeys, for example, have four more grinding teeth than those of the corresponding warm latitudes of Africa and Asia: they have the nostrils wider apart, and the tail prehensile in most, to compensate for their incomplete or absent thumbs. The sloths, the armadillos, and the true anteaters are beasts strictly peculiar to South America. Great was the surprise of European naturalists when the discovery of the New World first brought these forms of mammalian life under their notice. Centuries have since elapsed, but the most assiduous researches have failed to make known a species of Bradypus, Dasypus, or true Myrmecophaga, in any other part of the globe. Again, the vast island or continent of Australia has an indigenous quadruped population as peculiar as that of South America, and still more remarkable on account of the general prevalence of the marsupial economy. (It is, we need hardly say, the endowment of the mother with a natural pouch, or tegumentary nest, for the conveyance of her young, which has suggested this name.) With the exception of the native naked

* Bones of this till lately deemed fabulous bird were exhibited by Sir William Jardine, Mr. Strickland, and Professor Milne Edwards, at the late meeting of aturalists at Oxford, where the unique relics of the famous Dodo were duly descanted upon.

biped and his dog,-probably a contemporary importation,—not any mammalian species has been discovered in Australia which agrees with a known species or even genus in the rest of the world. New Guinea has its tree-kangaroos, Amboyna and the neighbouring Indian isles their phalangers, and the Americas have their opossums; but the genera Dendrolagus, Cuscus, and Didelphys, to which these extra-Australian marsupials respectively belong, are represented by no species in Australia, which, from the number and variety of other pouched genera, may be called the metropolis of marsupials. Here the true kangaroos (Macropus), the carnivorous opossums (Dasyurus), the wombats (Phascolomys), with a host of other genera, and with the still more extraordinary and anomalous duck-mole (Ornithorhynchus), are features of animal life as distinct from those in the rest of the world, as are the sloths, the ant-eaters, and armadillos of South America, or the giraffe, the hippopotamus, and the orycteropus of Africa. Let any one reflect on the limited powers of locomotion assigned to the last-cited huge fossorial insectivore, to the heavy burrowing wombat, to the climbing sloth, or the diving duckmole, which shuffles awkwardly along dry land like a reptile, and is restricted in the aquatic part of its amphibious existence to tranquil pools of fresh water, and let him associate these impediments to migration with the facts of the present geographical distribution of the species so fettered; or let him ponder upon the allocation of the few struthious birds which now exist in connexion with their want of wings and of webbed feet:—and say whether Zoology has not presented a problem which, when rightly solved, will effect as great a revolution in men's ideas of the time and the mode of the dispersion of animal life over the earth's surface as the Copernican system did in those regarding the relations of our planet to the sun.

Zoology, by the application of that branch of the science called Palæontology, has already carried us a long way back. With regard to the continents composing what geographers call the Old World, it has shown, by its power of determining the natural affinities of extinct species from their fossil remains, that mammalian forms, now limited to particular regions of that great natural tract of dry land, were of yore more generally dispersed over it; that hyænas, elephants, and rhinoceroses, were as common in Europe as they now are in Asia, if not more abundant; and that giraffes and hippopotamuses once co-existed in Africa, Asia, and Europe. The species, indeed, were different; but the same generic forms were at one time widely dispersed over the whole of this Old World, of which they may be regarded as peculiarly characteristic. When, thanks

to