wolves
and other noxious animals, on both sides of the British Channel, was
adduced, by Verstegan and Desmarest, as one of many arguments to prove
that England and France were once united; so the correspondence of the
aquatic species of the inland seas of Asia with those of the Black Sea
tend to confirm the hypothesis, for which there are abundance of
independent geological data, that those seas were connected together by
straits at no remote period of the earth's history.

_Geographical Distribution and Migrations of Birds._

I shall now offer a few observations on some of the other divisions of
the animal kingdom. Birds, notwithstanding their great locomotive
powers, form no exception to the general rules already laid down; but,
in this class, as in plants and terrestrial quadrupeds, different groups
of species are circumscribed within definite limits. We find, for
example, one assemblage in the Brazils, another in the same latitudes in
Central Africa, another in India, and a fourth in New Holland. Of
twenty-six different species of land birds found in the Galapagos
archipelago, all, with the exception of one, are distinct from those
inhabiting other parts of the globe;[898] and in other archipelagos a
single island sometimes contains a species found in no other spot on the
whole earth; as is exemplified in some of the parrot tribes. In this
extensive family, which are, with few exceptions, inhabitants of
tropical regions, the American group has not one in common with the
African, nor either of these with the parrots of India.[899]

Another illustration is afforded by that minute and beautiful tribe, the
humming-birds. The whole of them are, in the first place, peculiar to
the new world; but some species are confined to Mexico, while others
exist only in some of the West India Islands, and have not been found
elsewhere in the western hemisphere. Yet there are species of this
family which have a vast range, as the _Trochilus flammifrons_ (or
_Mellisuga Kingii_), which is found over a space of 2500 miles on the
west coast of South America, from the hot dry country of Lima to the
humid forests of Tierra del Fuego. Captain King, during his survey in
the years 1826-30, found this bird at the Straits of Magellan, in the
month of May--the depth of winter--sucking the flowers of a large
species of fuchsia, then in bloom, in the midst of a shower of snow.

The ornithology of our own country affords one well-known and stri