Although starfish are common enough in the Andes and a seahorse has actually found its resting-place in La Paz, this does not alter the fact that scientific investigators have never found any strictly marine fauna in Lake Titicaca.

I wandered through the whole world from east to west, from north to south, comparing the fauna and flora of the different regions.

The major mentioned certain animals which constitute a somewhat varied fauna on the heights of the Pamir.

The faunas of what is now Europe, Asia, America, and Australia differed from each other much as they now differ: in fact,according to Adolphe Brongniart, whose statements we here condense,[a]the inhabitants of these different regions appear for the most part to have acquired, before the close of the tertiary period, the characters which essentially distinguish their existing faunas.

It is a beautiful trait in humankind, which, maybe, designing nature has endowed us with to spread her manifold creations, that even the most selfish of men delight in planting in new environments exotic seeds and plants, and in enriching the fauna of faraway islands with strange animals and insects.

The earth was teeming then with life as now; and in whatever corner of its surface the geologist finds the old strata, they hold a dead fauna as numerous as that which lives and moves above it.

Thus, midway between Australia and South America, each of which possesses an abundant and diversified mammalian fauna, a mass of land, which may have been as large as both put together, must have existed without a mammalian inhabitant.

There is no record of their ever appearing east of the Saguenay River, and this fact accounts for their absence from Newfoundland, which received its fauna from the north by way of Labrador, and not from the west by way of Cape Breton.

The Glacial Period eliminated half of this fauna, whereas the equatorial latitude of the fauna in Africa saved that fauna from the attack of the Glacial Period, which was so fatally destructive to the animals in the more northerly latitudes of America.

Like a young rake coming into a very large inheritance, we attacked this noble fauna with characteristic American improvidence, and with a rapidity compared with which the Glacial advance was eternally slow; the East went first, and in fifty years we have brought about an elimination in the West which promises to be even more radical than that effected by the ice.

Of all the biologists who have seriously studied the South American fauna on the ground, Bates probably rendered most service; but he hardly seems even to have seen the animals with which the hunter is fairly familiar.