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Show 1868.] MR. R. BROWN ON THE MAMMALS OF GREENLAND. 337 3. Geographical Distribution of Greenlandic Mammalia. Similarity of physical contour and a general uniformity of climate, varying, no doubt, in degree, but still sufficiently inhospitable throughout, with an abundance of the food on which all of them subsist throughout the habitable tracks and in the sea washing the shores of Greenland, have failed, contrary to what might have been expected, to produce a geographical distribution of the Mammalia in a like universal manner, or at all corresponding to the physical uniformity hinted at. It is only in the sea and on a narrow strip of land skirting the shores of Greenland that animal life has yet been found. The whole interior of the country appears to be merely a frozen waste, overlain to a depth of many feet by a huge mer de glace, extending, so far as yet known, over its entire extent (with the exception of the strip named) from north to south-a sea of freshwater ice whereon no creature lives, a death-like desert with nought to relieve the eye, its silence enlivened by the sound or sight of no breathing thing. This is the Inlands lis of the Danish colonists ; the outer strip, with its mossy valleys and ice-plained hills, is the well-remembered Fastland. Dreary, doubtless, it is to eyes only schooled in the scenery of more southern lands; but, with its covies of Ptarmigans flying up at your feet, with their whir \, the arctic fox barking its hue, hue, on the rocks, and the Reindeer browsing in the glens covered with the creeping birch (Betula nana, L.), the arctic willows (Salix herbacea, L., S. arctica, Pall., S. glauca, L., & c ) , the crow-berry (Empetrum), the Vacciniums, and the yellow poppies (Papaver nudicaule, L,), it is a place of life, compared with the cheerless waste lying beyond. It is with it, therefore, and the sea circling around, that we have to deal. Many of the animals comprising the mammalian fauna, influenced by no apparent physical cause, have but a limited geographical distribution, not extending south of a certain latitude, or north of another, while other species have a range over the shores of the frozen sea skirting three quarters of the world. Some species of Seals are migratory, while others are not; and the same is true of various species of Cetacea. All of the terrestrial species proper are indigenous all the year round, confined to the country by its insularity. I have drawn up a Table (pp. 340 & 341) expressing at a glance the degree and nature of their geographical distribution, local and general. In this Table I have divided the distribution under three main heads :-(1) general distribution over the range of the species, (2) nature of its distribution in Greenland, and (3) its local distribution in Greenland. I have, for the sake of convenience, divided the general range of Greenland species into six subdivisions, viz. :-(a) Circumpolar, comprehending the regions around the most northern limits yet reached by man, the particular locality within that region for each species being limited by the nature of its habitat; thus the Bear occupies the shores or frequents the icefields and the sea, the Seals the sea and the shore, or the ice-fields, PROC. ZOOL. Soc-1868, No. XXII. |