t 8,000 feet in the south and 12,000 feet in the
northern half of the island, and whose higher slopes and valleys are
everywhere clothed with magnificent forests. It is crossed by the line of
the Tropic of Cancer a little south of its centre; and this position,
combined with its lofty mountains, gives it an unusual variety of tropical
and temperate climates. These circumstances are all highly favourable to
the preservation and development of animal life, and from what we already
know of its productions, it seems probable that few, if any islands of
approximately the same size and equally removed from a continent will be
found to equal it in the number and variety of their higher animals. The
outline map (at page 392) shows that Formosa is connected with the mainland
by a submerged bank, the hundred-fathom line including it along with Hainan
to the south-west and Japan on the north-east; while the line of
two-hundred fathoms includes also the Madjico-Sima and Loo-Choo Islands,
and may, perhaps, mark out approximately the last great extension of the
Asiatic continent, the submergence of which isolated these islands from the
mainland.

_Animal Life of Formosa._--We are at present acquainted {402} with 35
species of mammalia, and 128 species of land-birds from Formosa, fourteen
of the former and forty-three of the latter being peculiar, while the
remainder inhabit also some part of the continent or adjacent islands. This
proportion of peculiar species is perhaps (as regards the birds) the
highest to be met with in any island which can be classed as both
continental and recent, and this, in all probability, implies that the
epoch of separation is somewhat remote. It was not, however, remote enough
to reach back to a time when the continental fauna was very different from
what it is now, for we find all the chief types of living Asiatic mammalia
represented in this small island. Thus we have monkeys; insectivora;
numerous carnivora; pigs, deer, antelopes, and cattle among ungulata;
numerous rodents, and the edentate Manis,--a very fair representation of
Asiatic mammals, all being of known genera, and of species either
absolutely identical with some still living elsewhere or very closely
allied to them. The birds exhibit analogous phenomena, with the exception
that we have here two peculiar and very interesting genera.

But besides the amount of specific and generic modification that has
occurred, we have another indication of