Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/534

 ^36 SOUTH AND EAST AFRICA. related by an English traveller that, in order to clear a pass.ige for a large tomb- stone, as many us twenty-five thousand trees were felled in a forest in the Betsileo territory.* Fauna. The Malagasy fauna, no less if not more original than the flora, excites the wonder of all naturalists, and causes them to indulge in all manner of speculations on the geological history of the island. The species peculiar to this insular region has given rise to the hypothesis, at first suggested by Geoffrey Saint- Hilaire, and afterwards more fully elaborated by the English naturalist Sclater, that Mada- gascar must be the remains of a continent which filled a part at least of the space now floo<lod by the waters of the Indian Ocean. This hypothetical continent even receied the name of Lemuria, from the characteristic members of the ape-like lemurian family, which is represented in Madagascar by a larger number of distinct species than in Africa or the Eastern Archipelago. Several men of science have accepted this suggestion in a more or less modified form, and Iliiickel himself at one time went so far as to ask whether this Lemuria, which has long ceased to exist, should not be regarded as the cradle and centre of dispersion of the various races of mankind. But Alfred Russell Wallace, after having for some time warmly upheld the theory that the Madagascar fauna attests the former existence of a vast Lemurian continent, now no longer believes in such enormous changes in the distribution of land and water on the surface of the glob-^. Nevertheless this writer must still feel compelled to admit that very considerable modifications have cert linly taken place in the relative positions of the continents and oceanic basins. In order to explain the presence of the African species which are also found in the island of Madagascar, Wallace supposes that the two regions must formerly have been uniterl, but that at that tiine Africa itself, still separated from the Mediterranean lands by a broad marine inlet, pi ssessed none of the animal species such as the lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, and gazelle, which afterwards arrived from the northern regions. In the same way he endeavours to explain, by tempo- rary isthmuses connecting continent with continent, or by seas separating them, the appearance in or the absence from Madagascar of diverse Asiatic, Malayan, Austmlian, or American animal tj-pes.f It is thus evident that even those naturalists who most strenuously maintain the long stability of the continental masses are themselves compelled to admit that the dry land has been profoundly mtKlified during the course of ages. While the oceanic islands are in general extremely poor in mammalians, Madagascar on the contrary possesses as many as sixty-six species of this order, a sufficient proof that this island must at one time have formed part of a much larger region. These mammals, however, are grouped in such a manner as to constitute • Banm, Autananarivo Annual, 1887, t Vvmparattvc Antiquity of ContinenU ; Geographical Dutnbution of Animals; Island Lift.