OCR Text |
Show 372 ISLAND LIFE. (rAUl' IT. named b y th e Portnab ue·s e Formosa' o. r "The Beau•t iful." Till q m· te recen tl y 1't was a te1·ra incogn~ta to naturalists, and we owe all our present knowledge of it to a sin?·Je man, the late Mr. Robert Swinhoe, who, in his official c~~pactty a~ one of our I · Cb1consu s 1n 'n"r.., , v1'sited it several times between l8• t:>6 an. d 186. 6, besides residing on it for more than a year. Durmg this penod he devoted all his spare time and energy to the study o~ natural history, more especially of the two important grou~s, b1rds and mamma1s ,. a·n d by employinoa a large staff of native collecto. rs anJ hunters, be obtained a very complete knowledge of Its fauna. In this case, too, we have the great advantage of a very thorough know ledge of the adjacent par~s of th~ continent, in great part due to Mr. Swinhoe's own exertiOns dnnng the twenty Tears of his service in that country. We possess, too, the Lrther advantage of having the "vho~e of the avail~ble ma~erials in these two classes collected together by :Mr. Swmhoe h1mself after full examination an<l comparison of specimens; so that there is probably no part of the worlJ (if we except Europs, North America., and British India) of whose warm-blooded vertebrates we possess fuller or more n,ccurate knowledge than we do of those of the coast districts of China ~md its islands.1 Physical jeat.u'res of Formosa.-The isla~ d. of Formosa is nearly half the size of Ireland, being 220 miles long, and from twenty to eighty miles wide. It is traverseJ clown its centre by a fine mountn,in range, which reaches an altitude of about. 8,000 feet in the south and 12,000 feet in the northern half of the island, and whose higher slopes and valleys are everywhere clothed with magnificent forests. It is crossed by the line of the Tropic of Cancer a little south of its centre; and this position, combined with its lofty mountains, gives it an unusual variety of tropical and temperate climates. These circumstances are all hiahly favourable to the preservation and development of animal life, and from what we already know of its productions, 1 Mr. Swinhoe died in October, 1877, at the early nge of forty-two. His writings on natural history are chiefly scattered through the volumes of the Proceedings of the Zoological Society and The Ibis; the whole being summarised in his Catalogue of the Marnrnals of South China and Formosa (P. Z. S ., 1870, p. 615), and his Catalogue of the Birds of China and its · Islands (P. Z. S., 1871, p. 337). CUAr. XVJTI.] JAPAN AND FOnMOSA. 373 it seems probable that few, if any islands of approximately the same size and equally removed from a continent will be found to equal it in the number and variety of their higher animals. The outline map (at page 364) shows that Formosa is connected with the mainland by a submerged bank, the hundred-fathom line including it along with Haiuan to the south-west and Japan on the north-east; while the line of two-hundred fathoms includes also the Madjico-Sima and Loo-Choo Islands, and may, perhaps, mark out approximately the last great extension of the Asiatic continent, the submergence of which isolated these islands from the mainlanJ. Animal Life of Formosa.-vVe are at present acquainted with 35 species of mammalia, and 128 species of land-birds from Formosa, fourteen of the furmer and forty-three of the latter being peculiar, w bile the remainder inhabit also Rome part of the continent or adjacent islands. This proportion of peculiar species is perhaps (ns regards the birds) the highest to be met with in any island which can be classed as both continental and recent, and this, in all probability, implies that the epoch of separation is somewhat remote. It was not, however, remote enough to reach back to a time when the continental fauna was very different from what it is now, for we find all the chief types of living Asiatic mammalia represented in this small island. Thus we have monkeys; insectivora; numerous car-· nivora; pigs, deer, antelopes, and cattle among ungulata; numerous rodents, and the edentate Manis,-a very fair representation of Asiatic mammals, all being of known genera, and of species either absolutely identical with some still living elsewhere or very closely allied to them. rrhe binls exhibit analogous phenomena, with the exception that we have here two peculiar and very interesting genera. But besides the amount of specific and generic modification that has occurred, we have another indication of the lapse of time in the peculiar relations of a large proportion of the Formosan animals, which show that a great change in the distribution of Asiatic species must have taken place since the separation of the island from the continent. Before pointing these out it will be advantageous to give lists of the mammalia |