proprietors were to yield to the clamour of the Anti-Game-Law League, the red grouse or moor-game might cease to be, as they occur nowhere else on the known earth save in Britain and the Emerald Isle. The geographical distribution of animals, in general, has been made conformable to laws which we cannot fathom. A mysterious relationship exists between certain organic structures and those districts of the earth's surface which they inhabit. Certain extensive groups, in both the animal and vegetable kingdom, are found to be restricted to particular continents, and their neighbouring islands. Of some the distribution is very extensive, while others are totally unknown except within a limited space, such as some solitary isle, "Placed far amid the melancholy main." "In the present state of science," says Mr Strickland, "we must be content to admit the existence of this law, without being able to enunciate its preamble. It does _not_ imply that organic distribution depends on soil and climate; for we often find a perfect identity of these conditions in opposite hemispheres, and in remote continents, whose faunæ and floræ are almost wholly diverse. It does not imply that allied but distinct organisms have been adduced, by generation or spontaneous development, from the same original stock; for (to pass over other objections) we find detached volcanic islets, which have been ejected from beneath the ocean, (such as the Galapagos, for instance,) inhabited by terrestrial forms allied to those of the nearest continent, though hundreds of miles distant, and evidently never connected with them. But this fact may indicate that the Creator, in forming new organisms to discharge the functions required from time to time by the ever vacillating balance of nature, has thought fit to preserve the regularity of the system by modifying the types of structure already established in the adjacent localities, rather than to proceed _per saltum_ by introducing forms of more foreign aspect." In conformity with this relation between geographical distribution and organic structure, it has been ascertained that a small portion of the indigenous animals and plants of the islands of Rodriguez, Bourbon, and the Isle of France, are either allied to or identical with the productions of continental Africa, a larger portion with those of Madagascar, while certain species are altogether peculiar to the insular group above named.