under the influence of a variety of causes,
especially in the class of terrestrial mammalia. Scarcely any one of
these could be expected to retain as fair a claim to the title of
cosmopolite as man, although even the human race, fitted as it is by its
bodily constitution and intellectual resources to spread very widely
over the earth, is far from being strictly cosmopolite. It is excluded
both from the arctic and antarctic circles, from many a wide desert and
the summits of many mountain-chains; and lastly, from three-fourths of
the globe covered by water, where there are large areas very prolific in
animal life, even in the highest order of the vertebrate class. But the
_habitations_ of species are, as before stated, in reference to plants
(see above, p. 614), circumscribed by causes different from those which
determine their _stations_, and these causes are clearly connected with
the time and place of the original creation of each species.

As the names and characters of land quadrupeds are much better known to
the general reader than those of other great families of the animal
kingdom, I shall select this class to exemplify the zoological provinces
into which species are divisible, confining myself, however, to those
facts which may help to elucidate some principle, or rule apparently
followed by the Author of Nature, in regard to that "mystery of
mysteries," the first peopling of the earth with living beings.[873]
First, then, the _European region_ comprehends, besides Europe, the
borders of the Mediterranean, and even the north of Africa, and extends
into Asia, beyond the Oural mountains and the Caspian. Although the
species are almost all peculiar, the number of characteristic _genera_
is remarkably small. The bear, the fox, the hare, the rabbit, the deer,
and almost every European form is found equally in several of the other
large provinces of mammalia, where the species are distinct. Even the
mole (_Talpa_), although confined to the northern parts of the old
world, ranges eastwards, as far as the Himalaya mountains.

2dly. The _African_ Fauna, on the other hand, is singularly rich in
generic forms, not met with in a living state in any other region. The
hippopotamus, for example, of which two very distinct species are known,
the giraffe, the Chimpanzee, the blue-faced baboon, the four-fingered
monkeys (_Colubus_), many carnivora, such as _Proteles_, allied to the
hyaena, and a multitude of other forms, are exc