deer, walruses, seals, whales, and narwals, in regions of ice and snow,
where the smallest snakes, efts, and frogs are rarely, if ever, seen.

A still more anomalous state of things presents itself in the southern
hemisphere. Even in the temperate zone, between the latitudes 52 degrees
and 56 degrees S., as, for example, in Tierra del Fuego, as well as in
the woody region immediately north of the Straits of Magellan, and in
the Falkland Islands, no reptiles of any kind are met with, not even a
snake, lizard, or frog; but in these same countries we find the guanaco
(a kind of llama), a deer, the puma, a large species of fox, many small
rodentia, besides the seal and otter, together with the porpoise, whale,
and other cetacea.

On what grand laws in the animal physiology these remarkable phenomena
depend, cannot in the present state of science be conjectured; nor could
we predict whether any opposite condition of the atmosphere, in respect
to heat, moisture, and other circumstances, would bring about a state of
animal life which might be called the converse of that above described,
namely, a state in which reptiles of every size and order might abound,
and mammalia disappear.

The nearest approximation to such a fauna is found in the Galapagos
Archipelago. These islands, situated under the equator, and nearly 600
miles west of the coast of Peru, have been called "the land of
reptiles," so great is the number of snakes, large tortoises, and
lizards, which they support. Among the lizards, the first living species
proper to the ocean has been discovered. Yet, although some of these
islands are from 3000 to 4000 feet high, and one of them 75 miles long,
they contain, with the exception of one small mouse, no indigenous
mammifer. Even here, however, it is true that in the neighboring sea
there are seals, and several kinds of cetacea.[221]

It may be unreasonable to look for a nearer analogy between the fauna
now existing in any part of the globe, and that which we can show to
have prevailed when our secondary strata were deposited, because we must
always recollect that a climate like that now experienced at the
equator, coexisting with the unequal days and nights of European
latitudes, was a state of things to which there is now no counterpart on
the globe. Consequently, the type of animal and vegetable existence
required for such a climate might be expected to deviate almost as
widely from that now established, as do the f