the reverse), I will select the following,--extracted from my preface to that work. "Taking a cursory view of the Coleoptera here described, the fauna may perhaps be pronounced as having a greater affinity with that of Sicily than of any other country which has been hitherto properly investigated. Apart from the large number of our genera (and even species) which are diffused over more or less of the entire Mediterranean basin, this is especially evinced in some of the most characteristic forms,--such as _Apotomus_, _Xenostrongylus_, _Tarphius_, _Cholovocera_, _Holoparamecus_, _Berginus_, _Litargus_, _Thorictus_, and _Boromorphus_. There is, moreover, strange though it may appear to be, some slight (though decided) collective assimilation with what we observe in the south-western extremity of our own country and of Ireland,--nearly all the species which are common to Madeira and the British Isles being found in those particular regions; whilst one point of coincidence at any rate, and of a very remarkable nature, has been fully discussed under _Mesites_. Whether or not this partial parallelism may be employed to further Professor E. Forbes's theory of the _quondam_ approximation, by means of a continuous land, of the Kerry and Gallician hills, and of a huge miocene continent extending beyond the Azores, and including all these Atlantic clusters within its embrace, I will not venture to suggest: nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that, so far as the Madeiras betoken, everything would go to favour this grand and comprehensive idea. Partaking in the main of a Mediterranean fauna, the _northern tendency_ of which is in the evident direction of the south-western portions of England and Ireland, and with a profusion of endemic modifications of its own (bearing witness to the engorgement of this ancient tract with centres of radiation created expressly for itself), whilst geology proclaims the fact that _subsidences_ on a stupendous scale have taken place, by which means the ocean's groups were constituted; we seem to trace out on every side records of the past, and to catch the glimpses, as it were, of a _veritable_ Atlantis from beneath the waves of time[67]."