The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New Zealand is seen not only in the absence of mammals and the abundance of remarkable birds, many of them flightless, but also in the fact that there are no snakes in this vast area--no crocodiles, no tortoises--only fourteen small kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), and only one species of frog (and that only ever seen by a very few persons)! There were fish in the rivers when settlers arrived there, but none very remarkable. Insects and flies of every kind, scorpions, spiders, centipedes, land-snails and earth-worms were all flourishing in the forests of New Zealand a thousand years ago, serving in large measure as the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great island continent of Australia, 1,500 miles away, is peculiar enough in its living products, quite unlike the rest of the world in its egg-laying duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and in its abundant and varied population of pounched mammals or marsupials, emphasized by the absence (except for two or three peculiar little mice and the late-arrived black-fellow and bush-dog) of the regular type called "placental" mammals which inhabit the rest of the world. The rest of the world except New Zealand! Strange as Australia is, New Zealand is yet stranger. Long as the isolation of Australia has endured, and archaic and primitive in essential characters as is its living freight of animals and plants navigated (as it were) in safety and isolation to our present days, yet New Zealand has a still more primitive, a more ancient cargo. When we divide the land surfaces of the earth according to their history as indicated by the nature of their living fauna and flora and their geological structure, and the fossilised remains of their past inhabitants, it becomes necessary to separate the whole land surface into two primary sections: (_a_) New Zealand, and (_b_) the rest of the world, "Theriogoea," or the land of beasts (mammals). Then we divide Theriogoea into (1) the land of Marsupials (Australia) and (2) the land of Placentals (the rest of the world). This last great area is divisible according to the same principles into the great northern belt of land, the Holarctic region and the (three not equally distinct) great southward-reaching land surfaces--the Neo-tropical (South America), the Ethiopian (Africa, south of the Sahara), and the Oriental (India and Malay).