Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/645

Rh and has lost it just as one species of Balanoglossus has lost it, as Mr. Bateson has lately discovered.

The littoral zone has given off colonists to the other three faunal regions. The entire terrestrial fauna has sprung from colonists contributed by the littoral zone. Every terrestrial vertebrate bears in its early stages the gill-slits of its aquatic ancestor. All organs of aerial respiration are mere modifications of apparatus previously connected with aquatic respiration, excepting, perhaps, in the case of Tracheata, tracheæ being most likely modifications of skin-glands, as appears probable from their condition in Peripatus. The oldest known air-breathing animals are insects and scorpions, which have lately been found in Silurian strata. Professor Ray Lankester believes the lungs of scorpions to be homogeneous with the gill-plates of Limulus. Birds were possibly originally developed in connection with the sea-shore, and were fish-eaters like the tooth-bearing Hesperornis.

The fauna of the coast has not only given rise to the terrestrial and fresh-water fauna; it has from time to time given additions to the pelagic fauna in return for having thence derived its own starting-points. It has also received some of these pelagic forms back again, to assume a fresh littoral existence.

The deep-sea fauna has probably been formed almost entirely from the littoral, not in the remotest antiquity, but only after food derived from the débris of the littoral and terrestrial faunas and floras became abundant.

It is because all terrestrial and deep-sea animal forms have passed through a littoral phase of existence, and that the littoral animals retain far better than those of any other faunal region the recapitulative larval phases by means of which alone the true histories of their origins can be recovered, that marine zoölogical laboratories on the coast have made so many brilliant discoveries in zoölogy during late years.



HOEVER associates with the name of Siberia the idea of a vast prison is involved in as great an error as the person who conceives the country as an icy desert or an interminable tundra. The tundras, whose icy fields form a prominent feature in the polar regions, with the stunted vegetation of their southern parts, are no myths, nor is it a fiction that the Russian Government, following the example of France and England, has adopted a system of penal colonies, and has planted them in Siberia. But by far the larger part of this immense territory has been spared the presence of convicts; and the districts 