n we remember that it is a relic of the pre-Angiospermous flora, and
is of Araucarian ancestry, it cannot be said that the impossibility,
in so prolonged a history, of the bodily transference of cone-bearing
branches or even of trees, compels us as a last resort to fall back on
continental extension to account for its existing distribution.

When Darwin was in the Galapagos Archipelago, he tells us that he
fancied himself "brought near to the very act of creation." He saw
how new species might arise from a common stock. Krakatau shows us an
earlier stage and how by simple agencies, continually at work, that
stock might be supplied. It also shows us how the mixed and casual
elements of a new colony enter into competition for the ground and
become mutually adjusted. The study of Plant Distribution from a
Darwinian standpoint has opened up a new field of research in Ecology.
The means of transport supply the materials for a flora, but their
ultimate fate depends on their equipment for the "struggle for
existence." The whole subject can no longer be regarded as a mere
statistical inquiry which has seemed doubtless to many of somewhat arid
interest. The fate of every element of the earth's vegetation has sooner
or later depended on its ability to travel and to hold its own under
new conditions. And the means by which it has secured success is an
each case a biological problem which demands and will reward the most
attentive study. This is the lesson which Darwin has bequeathed to us.
It is summed up in the concluding paragraph of the "Origin" ("Origin of
Species" (6th edition), page 429.):--"It is interesting to contemplate a
tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing
on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms
crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately
constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon
each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting
around us."

XVII. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. By Hans Gadow, M.A., Ph.D.,
F.R.S.

Strickland Curator and Lecturer on Zoology in the University of
Cambridge.

The first general ideas about geographical distribution may be found
in some of the brilliant speculations contained in Buffon's "Histoire
Naturelle". The first special treatise on the subject was however
written in 1777 by E.A.W. Zimmermann, Professor of Natural Science
at Bruns