Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.3)

610 ADDENDA. be added to this list of animals as indigenous to America ;" and it is evident from a previous passage, that the bones have been found fossil. Mr. Rogers states, that the remains of two kinds of elephant and three kinds of oxen have been discovered there ; as have, on two occasions, parts of the Megatherium. At Big Bone Lick, where the remains of the ele- phant, mastodon, and ox, are so extraordinarily numerous, the megalonyx has been found ; and this is a parallel case to the contemporaneous em- bedment, in the southern hemisphere, of the mastodon, horse, mega- therium, and the other Edentata. The more I reflect on the geo- graphical distribution in the Old and New World of these gigantic mammifers, during the period antecedent to the present, in relation to the existing faunas of North and South America, now so strongly con- trasted with each other, the more pregnant with interest the case appears to be. I know of no other instance, in which we can thus almost mark the period of the splitting up of one great region into two well charac- terized zoological provinces. With respect to the ancient range of the genus Equus, I may add to what has already been said, that its remains have been found from England in the west, to the Himalaya in the east, (BucldancSs Reliquifs DiluviancE, p. 222,) and from the western coast of North America, to the eastern plains of America in the southern hemi- sphere. We may, therefore, suspect that a very little research would disco- ver the remains of the horse, embedded in the frozen soil of Kamtschatka, with tliose of the fossil ox and elephant ; and thus render complete the evidence, tliat we there see the ancient, but perhaps temporary line of junction, since interrupted, between the fauna of what we call the New World with that of the Old. But I doubt not, that the snow-clad heights of Chimborazo, Illimani and Aconcagua have seen as many, and as strange forms of animals, pass by and become extinct, as ever did the Alpine pin- nacles, or those loftiest ones of the Himalaya. Page 2()8. When contrasting the productions of the eastern coast of South Ame- rica, with those of the western, and likewise with those of the correspond- ing parallels of latitude in Europe, I should have added (line 15) after the grape and fig, as flourishing in lat. 41°, the peach, and the nectarine (both of course standards), water and musk melons, batatas dulces (Convolvulus batatas), the olive and the orange ; the latter, however, had only been lately introduced, but it promised to succeed well. Page 272. I have spoken of the low latitudes in which tropical forms of vegetation