Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/193

 have had a world-wide distribution; but Chelydidae may well have centred in an antarctic continent. Chelydridae were periarctic and have disappeared from Eurasia; N. American offshoots are the Cinosterridae and Dermatemydidae, the latter now restricted to Central American countries.

Crocodilia, probably once universal, afford through the Chinese alligator an instance of the original intimate connexion of the whole holarctic region, paralleled by many other animals which now happen to be restricted to E. Asia and to eastern N. America.

Lacertilia are less satisfactory for short diagnoses. America alone combines Iguanidae and Tejidae:—

N. America: Iguanidae, Anguidae, Tejidae (and Rhineura in Florida).

S. America: Iguanidae, Anguidae, Tejidae and many Amphisbaenidae.

Africa and Madagascar: Chameleons and Zonuridae and Gerrhosauridae.

Madagascar: Chameleons and Iguanidae.

India: Varanidae, Agamidae and Lacertidae, all of which also in Africa.

Australia alone has Pygopodidae.

The Lacertilia are now distributed upon principles very different from those of the tortoises. According to the lizards the world is divided into an E. and a W. half. The W. alone has Iguanidae and Tejidae, the E. alone that important combination of Varanidae and Agamidae. Further subdivision is in most cases possible only by exclusion, e.g. exclusion of Lacertilia and chameleons from Australia; of Varanidae and Agamidae from Madagascar. Lizards are rather susceptible to climatic conditions, infinitely more than water tortoises.

As regards Ophidia, America has Crotalinae and Elapinae, but no Viperinae. Eurasia and India alone combines Viperinae, Crotalinae and Elapinae. Africa, Viperinae and Elapinae but no Crotalinae. Australia only Elapinae. Madagascar none of these groups.

The Viperinae must have had their original centre in the palaearctic countries, and they have been debarred only from Australia and Madagascar. Both vipers and pit vipers are still in Asia, but true vipers are absent in America, with their fullest development now in Africa, whilst pit vipers went E., covering now the whole of America, and having developed the rattlesnakes in Sonoraland. The Elapinae are undoubtedly of Asiatic origin; they have overrun Africa, were too late for Madagascar, but early enough for Australia, where they are only poisonous snakes; and only one genus, Elaps, has got into, or rather, has differentiated in America, in the S. of which it is abundant.

Opisthoglypha are useless for our purpose; they are cosmopolitan, with the exception of Australia, but probably they have one ancient centre in S. America, and another in the old world.

Amblycephalidae afford another of those curious instances of apparent affinity between S.E. Asia and Central America; paralleled by Pelamis bicolor, which ranges from Madagascar to Panama, while all the other Hydrophinae belong to the Indian Ocean and the E. Asiatic seas. Aglyphous Colubrines show undoubted affinity between N. America and Eurasia; the whole group is absolutely cosmopolitan, and many of the genera, e.g. Coluber, Tropidonotus and Coronella, have proved their success by having acquired an enormous range. Snakes have comparatively few enemies, and they possess exceptional means of distribution. It is rare for a terrestrial species to have such a wide range as Crotalus terrificus, from Arizona to Argentina, or as the India cobra, which, like the tiger, is equally at home in Malay islands, Manchuria and Turkestan.

The tortoises divide the habitable world into a S. and a N. world, much as do the anurous Batrachians; the lizards split it into an E. and a W. hemisphere. The poisonous snakes, the most recent of reptiles in their full development and distribution, allow us to distinguish between Australia, America and the rest of the world.

 REPTON, a village in the S. parliamentary division of Derbyshire, England, 8 m. S.W. of Derby, on the Midland railway. Pop. (1901) 1695. It is famous for its school, founded in 1557 by Sir John Port, of the neighbouring village of Etwall, which has valuable entrance scholarships, and two leaving exhibitions to the universities annually. The number of boys is about 300. The school buildings are modern, but incorporate considerable portions of an Augustinian priory established in 1172. There was an ecclesiastical establishment on this site in the 7th century, the first bishop of Mercia being established here. This was destroyed by the Danes in 874. In the second half of the 10th century, during the reign of Edgar, another church was founded. The existing parish church of St Wystan retains pre-Conquest work in the chancel, beneath which is a remarkably fine vaulted crypt, probably dating from the reign of Edgar, its roof supported on fluted columns. The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII. 

REPUBLIC (Lat. respublica, a commonweal or commonwealth), a term now universally understood to mean a state, or polity, in which the head of the government is elective, and in which those things which are the interest of all are decided upon by all. This is notoriously a very modern interpretation of the term. In the ancient world of Greece and Rome the franchise was in the hands of a minority, who were surrounded by, and who governed, a majority composed of men personally free but not possessed of the franchise, and of slaves. Modern writers have often used respublica, and literal translation, as meaning only the state, even when the head was an absolute king, provided that he held his place according to law and ruled by law. “Republic,” to quote one example only of many, was so used by Jean Bodin, whose treatise, commonly known by its Latin name De Republica Libri Sex, first appeared in French in 1577. Englishmen of the middle ages habitually spoke of the commonwealth of England, though they had no conception that they could be governed except by a king with hereditary right. The coins of Napoleon bear the inscription “République française, Napoléon Empereur.” Except as an arbitrary term of art, or as a rhetorical expression, “republic” has, however, always been understood to mean a state in which the head holds his place by the choice of his subjects. Poland was a republic because its king had in earlier times to be accepted, and in later times was chosen by a democracy composed of gentry. Venice was a republic, though after the “closing of the great council” the franchise was confined to a strictly limited aristocracy, which was itself in practice dominated by a small oligarchy. The seven states which formed the confederation of the United Netherlands were republics from the time they renounced their allegiance to Philip II., though they chose to be governed by a stadtholder to whom they delegated large powers, and though the choice of the stadtholder was made by a small body of burghers who alone had the franchise. The varieties are many. What, however, is emphatically not a republic is a state in which the ruler can truly tell his subjects that the sovereignty resides in his royal person, and that he is king, or tsar, “pure and absolute,” by the grace of God, even though he may hasten to add that “absolute” is not “despotic,” which means government without regard to law. The case of Great Britain, where the king reigns theoretically by the grace of God, but in fact by a parliamentary title and under the Act of Settlement, is, like the whole British constitution, unique.

There is in fact a fundamental incompatibility between the conceptions of government as a commonwealth and as an institution based on a right superior to the people's will. Where the two views endeavour to live together one of two things must happen. The ruler will confiscate the rights of the community to himself and will become the embodiment of sovereignty, which is what happened in most of the states of Europe at the close of the middle ages; or the community, acting through some body politic which is its virtual representative, will confine the head of the government to defined functions.

The question of representation is dealt with separately (see ), but the conception of a republic in which all males, who do not belong to an inferior and barbarous race, share in the suffrage is one which would never have been accepted in the ancient or medieval world, for it is based on a foundation of which they knew nothing,—the political rights of man. When the Scottish reformer John Knox based his claim to speak on the government of the realm on the fact that he was “a subject born within the same” he advanced a pretension very new to his generation. But it was one which was fated to achieve a great fortune. The right of the subject, simply as a member of the community, to a voice in the community in which he was born, and on which his happiness depended, implied all “the rights of man” as they were to be stated by the American Declaration of Independence, and again by the French in 1789. As they could be vindicated only by revolt against monarchical governments in the old World and the new, and as they were incompatible with all the convictions which make monarchy possible, they embodied