These three tables show us an amount of speciality hardly to be found in the birds of any other part of the globe. Out of 111 land-birds in Madagascar, only 12 are identical with species inhabiting the adjacent continents, and most of these belong to powerful-winged, or wide-ranging forms, which probably now often pass from one country to the other. The peculiar species--49 land-birds and 7 waders, or aquatics--are mostly well-marked forms of African genera. There are, however, several genera (marked by italics) which have Oriental or Palæarctic affinities, but not African, viz.--_Copsychus_, _Hypsipetes_, _Hypherpes_, _Alectrænas_, and _Margaroperdix_. These indicate a closer approximation to the Malay countries than now exists. The table of 33 peculiar genera is of great interest. Most of these are well-marked forms, belonging to families which are fully developed in Africa; though it is singular that not one of the exclusively African families is represented in any way in Madagascar. Others, however, are of remote or altogether doubtful affinities. _Sittidæ_ is Oriental and Palæarctic, but not Ethiopian. _Oxylabes_ and _Mystacornis_ are of doubtful affinities. _Artamia_ and _Cyanolanius_ still more so, and it is quite undecided what family they belong to. _Calicalicus_ is almost equally obscure. _Neodrepanis_, one of the most recent discoveries, seems to connect the Nectariniidæ with the Pacific {278}Depanididæ. _Euryceros_ is a complete puzzle, having been placed with the hornbills, the starlings, or as a distinct family. _Falculia_ is an exceedingly aberrant form of starling, long thought to be allied to _Irrisor_. _Philepitta_, forming a distinct family, (Paictidæ), is most remarkable and isolated, perhaps with remote South American affinities. _Leptosoma_ is another extraordinary form, connecting the cuckoos with the rollers. _Atelornis_, _Brachypteracias_, and _Geobiastes_, are terrestrial rollers, with the form and colouring of _Pitta_. So many perfectly isolated and remarkable groups are certainly nowhere else to be found; and they fitly associate with the wonderful aye-aye (_Chiromys_), the insectivorous Centetidæ, and carnivorous _Cryptoprocta_ among the Mammalia. They speak to us plainly of enormous antiquity, of long-continued isolation; and not less plainly of a lost continent or continental island, in which so many, and various, and peculiarly organized creatures, could have been gradually developed in a connected fauna, of which we have here but the fragmentary remains.