IV.—miscellaneous.

Art. XLVI.—On the Ancient Relations between New Zealand and South America. By Dr. H. von Jhering, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Communicated by Professor Hutton. [Translated from the German by H. Suter.] [Read before the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, 6th August, 1891.] The following communication is due to the elaborate papers of Professor F. W. Hutton “On the Origin of the Fauna and Flora of New Zealand,”* Annals and Magazine of Natural History, ser. 5, vol. xiii., p. 425, and vol. xv., p. 77. which were made accessible to me by the great kindness of the author. On the whole, the views contained in those papers agree with my own ideas of the former connection between the areas under consideration, which are in opposition to Mr. Wallace, from the views of whom I, with Professor Hutton, differ in very essential points. In my opinion, an important defect in Mr. Wallace's studies is the fact that he makes too little distinction between the different groups of the animal kingdom. Birds and mammals, whose living genera appear only in the Tertiary era, must evidently show a different geographical distribution from the Teleostei, reptiles, &c., which are represented in the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary era; or to the land and fresh-water molluscs, many of which were living already during the Secondary or even the PalÆozoic era. Mr. A. R. Wallace (“Darwinism,” 2nd ed., London, 1889) still upholds the doctrine of the “permanence of oceanic and continental areas.” I am as much convinced of the arroneousness of this doctrine, which quite arbitrarily takes the 1,000-fathom line as corresponding essentially to the limit of the ancient continents, as I am that the ideas of Darwin and Wallace on “natural selection” as the cause of the origin of species will have but a