With our present imperfect knowledge of the interior of Africa, only three great continental sub-regions can be well defined. The open pasture lands of interior tropical Africa are wonderfully uniform in their productions; a great number of species ranging from Senegal to Abyssinia and thence to the Zambesi, while almost all the commoner African genera extend over the whole of this area. Almost all this extensive tract of country is a moderately elevated plateau, with a hot and dry climate, and characterised by a grassy vegetation interspersed with patches of forest. This forms our first or East African sub-region. The whole of the west coast from the south side of the Gambia River to about 10° or 12° south latitude, is a very {252}different kind of country; being almost wholly dense forests where not cleared by man, and having the hot moist uniform climate, and perennial luxuriance of vegetation, which characterise the great equatorial belt of forest all round the globe. This forest country extends to an unknown distance inland, but it was found, with its features well marked, by Dr. Schweinfurth directly he crossed the south-western watershed of the Nile; and far to the south we find it again unmistakably indicated, in the excessively moist forest country about the head waters of the Congo, where the heroic Livingstone met his death. In this forest district many of the more remarkable African types are alone found, and its productions occasionally present us with curious similarities to those of the far removed South American or Malayan forests. This is our second or West African sub-region. Extra-tropical South Africa possesses features of its own, quite distinct from those of both the preceding regions (although it has also much in common with the first). Its vegetation is known to be one of the richest, most peculiar, and most remarkable on the globe; and in its zoology it has a speciality, similar in kind but less in degree, which renders it both natural and convenient to separate it as our third, or South African sub-region. Its limits are not very clearly ascertained, but it is probably bounded by the Kalahari desert on the north-west, and by the Limpopo Valley, or the mountain range beyond, on the north-east, although some of its peculiar forms extend to Mozambique. There remains the great Island of Madagascar, one of the most isolated and most interesting on the globe, as regards its animal productions; and to this must be added, the smaller islands of Bourbon, Mauritius and Rodriguez, the Seychelles and the Comoro Islands, forming together the Mascarene Islands,--the whole constituting our fourth sub-region. _Zoological Characteristics of the Ethiopian Region._--We have now to consider briefly, what are the peculiarities and characteristics of the Ethiopian Region as a whole,--those which give it its distinctive features and broadly separate it from the other primary zoological regions.