| THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES. |
By F. L. OSWALD.
I.—THE FAUNA OF THE ANTILLES: MAMMALS.
THE study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals has revealed facts almost as enigmatical as the origin of life itself. Water barriers, as broad as that of the Atlantic, have not prevented the spontaneous spread of some species, while others limit their habitat to narrowly circumscribed though not geographically isolated regions.
Tapirs are found both in the Amazon Valley and on the Malay Peninsula; the brook trout of southern New Zealand are identical with those of the Austrian Alps. Oaks and Ericacea (heather plants) cover northern Europe from the mouth of the Seine to the sources of the Ural; then suddenly cease, and are not found anywhere in the vast Siberian territories, with a north-to-south range rivaling that of all British North America.
But still more remarkable is the zoölogical contrast of such close neighborhood countries as Africa and Madagascar, or Central America and the West Indian archipelago. The Madagascar virgin woods harbor no lions, leopards, hyenas, or baboons, but boast not less than thirty-five species of mammals unknown to the African continent, and twenty-six found nowhere else in the world.
Of a dozen different kinds of deer, abundant in North America as well as in Asia and Europe, not a single species has found its way to the West Indies. The fine mountain meadows of Hayti have originated no antelopes, no wild sheep or wild goats.
In the Cuban sierras, towering to a height of 8,300 feet, there are no hill foxes. There are caverns—subterranean labyrinths with countless ramifications, some of them—but no cave bears or badgers, no marmots or weasels even, nor one of the numerous weasel-like creatures clambering about the rock clefts of Mexico. The magnificent coast forests of the Antilles produce wild-growing nuts enough to freight a thousand schooners every year, but—almost incredible to say—the explorers of sixteen generations have failed to discover a single species of squirrels.
The Old-World tribes of our tree-climbing relatives are so totally different from those of the American tropics that Humboldt's traveling companion, Bonplant, renounced the theory of a unitary center of creation (or evolution), and maintained that South America must have made a separate though unsuccessful attempt to rise from lemurs to manlike apes and men. Of such as they are, Brazil alone has forty-eight species of monkeys, and Venezuela at least thirty.
