Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/393

 Rh Before, however, giving the results of my researches on these various points, I will venture to indicate in half-a-dozen sentences what it is that gives great interest to the study of Madagascar ornithology.

The avi-fauna of the island comprises, as at present ascertained, about 240 species, including sea-birds, among which there are naturally numerous wide-ranging forms common to many other countries; and among these latter there is, of course, little that is peculiar or of any special interest. It is among the land-birds proper, numbering 150 species—and omitting many shore and water birds, as well as several of powerful flight and therefore of wide distribution—that we find some of those peculiar and isolated types of bird which, as Mr. Alfred R. Wallace remarks, "speak to us plainly of enormous antiquity, of long-continued isolation, and not less plainly of a lost .... continental island [or archipelago of large islands], in which so many, and various, and peculiarly organised creatures could have been gradually developed in a connected fauna, of which we have here but the fragmentary remains".

Madagascar possesses a considerable number of genera and species of birds peculiar to itself; 35 genera and 129 species, distributed among 55 families, one of which is also peculiar and confined to the island. The result of a detailed study of the Malagasy avi-fauna is, says M. Grandidier, "that it has a very specialised character, and that, notwithstanding the small distance which separates Madagascar from the African continent, its affinities are much greater with the extreme East than with Africa; since, if we leave on one side all the birds of powerful flight, there are about twice as many more allied to Oriental than to African species, besides which, the greater part of the characteristic African genera are entirely wanting."

Madagascar is indeed a kind of museum of antiquities as regards its animal life as a whole, and this is eminently the case with respect to many of its birds. For, while on the continents innumerable ancient forms of life have